FIELD AND GROVE MAGAZINE
Profiling Southwest Florida’s Agribusiness Community

FIELD AND GROVE MAGAZINE staff writer, Tina Giufre, covered Lee County's Troyer Brothers' potato operation for our February issue. The harvesting season and all aspects of the operation were in full swing when she interviewed Aaron Troyer. Tina provided the magazine with a great article and some fine photos to boot. Since then we have learned Troyer Brothers Inc. will be featured nationally on PBS this fall.

A production crew affiliated with the TV program, Food Sense, visited the farm recently to videotape harvesting operations and interview key personnel. Food Sense is a new one-hour program launching in the fourth quarter of this year which will air on public television stations across the United States.

With news of food scares increasing, consumers have raised their interest in learning more about where our food comes from and the process of getting food from source to table. The show will engage farmers, industry experts and consumers in a dialogue which will help consumers understand what they are eating from a health, nutrition, and taste and value perspective.

The show will be hosted by Phil lempert, a leading food and nutrition expert known as The Supermarket Guru. He is a regular correspondent for the Today Show, makes monthly appearances on ABC's The View, and has appeared numerous times on The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, CNN, CNBC, Discovery Health and MSNBC, as well as on local morning and news programs throughout the country.

Troyer Brothers Inc. is one of Florida's largest potato farms, with approximately 3,500 acres under management. Troyer's raises white, red and yellow potatoes which are sold locally, nationally and in Canada. The farm is a family-run concern, owned by brothers Vern, Don and David Troyer and is respected throughout the industry for the quality of its product and its efficient operations utilizing high-tech techniques to manage its fields.

The PBS production crew spent the day following a potato from when it was mechanically harvested from the ground by a massive tractor, scooped up into a truck and transported to the packing house, washed, scanned, sorted, graded, packaged, and then shipped out via semi-trailer the same day.

David's son, Aaron Troyer, is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the farm and was interviewed by PBS for the segment. He toured the crew through the fields and the packinghouse and explained the meticulous labeling that is used to track the produce so that any specific potato can be traced back to the same field from which it was harvested.

By Staff