In a world with diverse consumer preferences, it can be challenging for producers to determine marketing strategies and production practices that maximize their profits while meeting consumer demand for fresh products. Consumers could be willing to pay for products that reduce environmental impact, but producers must know whether these changes will pay off. This study estimated consumers’ willingness to pay for specific environmental factors pertaining to fresh tomato production using a choice experiment survey. This study found that Southeastern consumers are willing to pay a price premium for specific environmental factors: water conservation, reduced pesticide residue, fewer miles between production location and purchase location, and tomatoes grown without petroleum-based fertilizers. The results of this study are beneficial to regional tomato producers, who could incorporate specific environmental practices into current production schedules that lead to incremental changes in the environmental attributes that were evaluated in this survey.

Traditionally, burley tobacco has been harvested by hand because the green plant weight, volume, and leaf fragility make mechanical harvesting very challenging. This study examined possible ways to wilt a plant still standing in the field (termed ‘pre-wilting’) to reduce weight, volume, and leaf fragility. Several methods of pre-wilting burley tobacco plants in the field were explored including: root pruning, stalk girdling, freezing with liquid nitrogen, and burning. Experiments were conducted in three locations over three consecutive years during the tobacco harvest season. Leaf breaking angle, leaf moisture content and time-lapse photography were investigated as methods to quantify treatment effects on wilting. The time-lapse photography helped reveal that wilting was most prevalent during the late afternoon, and that wilted plants sometimes began to recover after more than five days, apparently due to root re-growth. Root pruning was the only mechanical means that caused witling reliably during the first two years of testing, and even then the results were somewhat inconsistent. During the third year, a high-clearance tobacco sprayer was modified with a hydraulically actuated coulter disc in order to root-prune a large number of subjects.

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