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IFPA Campaign Urges Leaders to Prioritize Fruits and Vegetables

Jul 17, 2025
By Farms.com

New Campaign Connects Fresh Produce to National Health Goals

The International Fresh Produce Association (IFPA) has launched a strong national campaign to highlight the importance of fruits and vegetables in improving America’s health. The campaign, titled “Fresh Produce for a Healthier America,” delivers a clear message: improving health starts with what we grow and eat.

Using powerful headlines like “Before there were pharmacies, there were farms” and “Before there were co-pays, there were carrots,” IFPA’s campaign calls on U.S. leaders to prioritize fruits and vegetables in health policy discussions.

The campaign is being shared across Washington, D.C.–focused media platforms, targeting healthcare policymakers directly. Its goal is to remind lawmakers that fresh produce plays a key role in fighting chronic diseases and reducing long-term healthcare costs.

The campaign supports IFPA’s recent policy recommendations to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission. These recommendations call for specific actions to expand produce access and improve public health.

IFPA urges the inclusion of produce prescriptions in federal healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. They also recommend expanding the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP) so that students in all schools can develop healthy eating habits early.

IFPA encourages support for safe crop protection tools and regenerative farming practices that help secure a strong and healthy food supply.

This campaign is part of IFPA’s larger mission to promote fruit and vegetable consumption, protect grower needs, and support the health of families across America.


Trending Video

Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.