Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Hello and welcome to the Mulch Matters podcast where we will explore the intriguing world of mulch and its impact on agriculture and the environment, as well as update you on the latest research about soil-biodegradable mulch and recycling options for plastic mulch. I am your host, Dr. Nataliya Shcherbatyuk, and I am a Research Associate working on the project, “Improving end-of-life management of plastic mulch in strawberry system”. In each episode, we’ll dive into the latest research, trends, news, and insights on why mulch matters and how we can improve plastic mulch end-of-life options. We’ll also branch out and discuss other plastics as well as talk to researchers, experts, and practitioners in the field who will share their insights and experiences on how to use mulch effectively in different settings.
[00:01:02] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Welcome back to another episode of Munch Matters podcast. Today, our guest is Kevin Morris, who is a graduate student at Washington State University. Hi, Kevin. How are you?
[00:01:16] Kevin Morris: Hi, Nataliya. I’m doing great. Uh, thank you so much for, uh, having me on the podcast. This is great.
[00:01:22] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Absolutely. Thank you so much for making the time to join the podcast. So, I wanted to start, and I usually like to start to, any of our podcasts from the introduction of our guest. And the way I like to do it is to ask you, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and how you got to work with this project.
[00:01:45] Kevin Morris: Yeah. So, um, my name is Kevin Morris. I’m a PhD student here at the School of Economic Sciences. I came from Chelan, Washington, so I’m native born Washington, and, uh, came to WSU, and I really got involved in this research, through my advisor, uh, Tom Marsh, and through one of my, I would say collaborators on this project, Suzette Galinato. I took a sustainable development course with her husband, Professor Gregmar Galinato, and he introduced me through to Tom Marsh as a result. And that course was really about environmental economic sustainability and things like that, and I was looking for a, a summer paid opportunity in research as a research assistant somehow. Mostly because my alternative was to go spend the summers fishing with my dad in Alaska. So, I knew if I wanted to sort of get serious about my academic career, I had to, uh, you know, stick myself out there in some way. And, uh, I got really fortunate that, Greg introduced me to Tom, and next thing I know, I’m doing my PhD and I’m interested in microplastics, plastic waste, and how we can improve our recycling systems. And so this was just sort of a natural opportunity for me to take my PhD ambitions and really apply myself somewhere.
[00:03:06] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: That’s exciting journey, I’m gonna tell you that.
[00:03:10] Kevin Morris: Thank you.
[00:03:10] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Yeah. Yeah. That’s very cool. And today we’ll be talking quite a bit about consumer willingness to pay, which is interesting and neat topic. But before we go into the conversation about that, I wanted to ask you what actually motivated you to study consumer willingness to pay for sustainable strawberry production, but also why is this question so important for growers right now?
[00:03:41] Kevin Morris: Ah, yes. So, I’ll start with the motivation part. So I think the reason that willingness to pay is our objective in our, our surveys is really… as economists, what we wanna do is demand estimation. So for this idea of a hypothetical line of strawberries grown with a commitment to sustainable disposal practices, you know, we can’t we can’t go and look at the data and say, “This is how many people have bought these,” because they just don’t exist in that form in the market yet as we’re describing them. We just have our traditional fresh box of strawberries. And so, what we have to do is construct a way to estimate demand for something that we don’t really have purchase data on.
And so, when we kind of have this willingness to pay characteristic, what we wanna do is say, you know, when… another way of asking that is, what is your demand for this product? But obviously, when you say, “What is your demand?” you know, you’re kind of asking a really open-ended question. Is that quantity? How much would you buy? Is that price? What price would you buy? And then of course, the interplay of those two things, higher price, lower quantity. So, willingness to pay, for us in this economic sense really goes from, okay, instead of saying, “How much would you demand these strawberries?” we would say, “What’s the most you’d be willing to pay for one unit of these strawberries?”
Imagine yourself at the store, you have this box of strawberries in front of you, and you know that purchasing them contributes to efforts to increasing our sustainable disposal practices in agriculture. And so, as economists, we understand that—like me personally, I should speak to myself without going, “…as economists…”. So me, like I buy a bottle of Coca-Cola at Safeway from the d… near the deli for my lunch, and it says, “Made with 95% recycled material.” And I think, you know, on some level I get utility from knowing that this bottle, you know, is somewhat, in a very small marginal way, better than the alternative of buying something that’s made from totally virgin resin is contributing brand-new plastic pollution. And so, what we wanna do is sort of extend that idea to people and just say, “What, you know… and hypothetically, what would your price premium be? You know, if you pay $4.25 for these strawberries now, would you pay $4.75 or $5.00? Or if not, then why?” And so the, you know, w… the willingness to pay is really our bridge from the academic jargon of demand estimation and sort of just getting down to how people, you know, operate day to day when they’re at the grocery store and making these decisions.
[00:06:10] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: And why strawberries? Why did you choose to work with strawberries specifically?
[00:06:14] Kevin Morris: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, strawberries for us, and particularly for policy makers, this presents a really unique opportunity for us. The reason being that strawberries are a relatively dense crop.
So, if you think about yield per acre, you can grow a lot of strawberries per acre relative to other crops—say pumpkins—that might use biodegradable mulch films or mulch films in general. And so, by having a crop that’s more dense per acre, when you are able to take this, um, willingness to pay question and say, “Look, we found that people are willing to pay 25 cents more per pound for these strawberries.” Well, when you have that in a situation with a very dense crop, that 25 cents per pound, well, you’re growing a lot of pounds per acre. So, these operations, the sort of the bottom line effect of saying, “Yeah, people are about willing to pay 20 cents, 25 cents more per pound of strawberries.” If you take that information to a grower, that’s a very large bottom-line effect because you can multiply that pounds per acre by how many acres of strawberries they have.
So, it’s really the nature of having this sort of dense crop that… because as economists, what we want to say is, “Yes, this willingness to pay, this premium that we anticipate consumers offering, is gonna meaningfully alter the behavior of growers.” And if that was a really small premium over a really small number of pounds, you know, that’s not gonna change behavior in the margins. But for a dense crop of strawberries, if you grow a large pound of strawberries, you know, for if your total harvest is a really large pound of strawberries, then yeah, that’s a really big bottom-line effect for these growers, and it might nudge their behavior to adopt these biodegradable mulch films, maybe just in part, but also in full.
[00:08:00] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Interesting. And let’s circle back to the plastic mulch specifically its disposal. So, we know that the disposal of plastic mulch is uniquely difficult, but I wonder if you can explain what do you think, what makes it hard to recycle or manage?
[00:08:21] Kevin Morris: Yeah. So, um, yeah, this is a really key part of, um, the disposal problem with biodegradable mulch film, and it’s what sets it apart from, like, my previous anecdote about the Coca-Cola bottle made from post-consumer recycled content.
You know, um, recycling soda bottles, relatively easy. They’re somewhat clean. They’re high-density polyethylene plastic. And so, in the recycling process, the, the dollars and cents just work out in a way that it’s always gonna be feasible to r- recycle such a product. But as you’re, as you’re getting at with this question, we don’t have that with these mulch films. And this is what really makes group number two with Karl England and others that working group that works on the advanced recycling techniques has a lot of useful information for us because they really address the core problems for why this mulch is so hard to recycle. Namely being that it’s contaminated with soil, plant residues, agrichemicals.
And something I actually learned from Jasmine with the California Marine Sanctuary group is they will use the mulch film in order to aid their fumigation. And so, they will use the mulch film after it’s been put over the crops and to cover the crops. Then they can pump the fumigants underneath that. And so that’s why you naturally will end up with these films that are highly contaminated, and it doesn’t mean they can’t be, you know, recycled. It just means that if they are recycled, they’re gonna really contaminate things, and they’re gonna really make it unprofitable for the recyclers. And so it is sort of a I mean, it’s a, it’s also a mechanical question. The mulch films, as we toured the recycling plants at our last meeting in March in Mount Vernon, we learned they got caught in the machinery as well. But I would say on average, it’s, uh, it’s sort of a dollar and cents problem where it costs more to recycle it than you recover.
[00:10:12] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: And for our listeners, can you tell a little bit more about the study, and more, I’m asking more about the design you use, of the study design and the bidding process. Just walk us through what that means and how you did it.
[00:10:29] Kevin Morris: Right. Yeah. So, I’ll avoid all of the academic jargon around this, but essentially the reason we came to this double-bounded bidding setting is because this is common in our, in our literature. And when economists do these types of studies, this has been found to be the most accurate way we can get to finding people’s true underlying willingness to pay.
But really quickly, about the bidding process, essentially what we do is we start with a baseline price, and we ask people a simple question with the baseline price, which is just the average price of a one-pound box of strawberries averaged across the total United States. And so, when you go on the USDA, we found that that was about $4.25. And so, when we say a double-bounded design, what that means is we’ll ask people, “Would you pay this average price of $4.25?” And then whether or not they say. So, let’s say yes. Well, then we’ll ask with a 50-cent premium, we’ll say, “Okay, would you pay $4.75 now for the same box of strawberries?” And then we record whether they say yes or no to that. And so we can kind of incrementally see, you know, where people’s willingness to pay lies in one of these bounds.
Sort of conversely, if they said no to paying $4.25 for the average price instead of yes, we would ask them if they would pay a, a 50-cent discount, $3.75. And then they would say yes or no. And then that’s where the bidding procedure ends. We ask them, “Would you pay the average?” Then if they say yes or no, we say, “Would you play, pay plus or minus 50 cents?” And that’s the, the double-bounded part is we’re trying to put their self-reported b… willingness to pay somewhere between this maximum, this upper-ended area above $4.75 or below $3.75, or is it somewhere in between?
And so that bidding procedure, it can seem a little kind of abstract. A single-bounded one would just be saying, “Would you pay $4.25? Yes, no,” and then leaving it there. But essentially what this does is the extra question gets us a little more information. How does someone who says yes to the initial bid and then yes to the follow-up bid differ from someone who says no to the initial and follow-up bids or any combination of that you can imagine? Sort of these marginal differences, across respondents. You know, the 50 cents, the yes, no, and then what demographically, how could these people be different?
[00:13:02] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Oh, interesting. So what did you learn from the response distribution, and especially when we’re talking about the fact that over 60% of responders accepted your both bids?
[00:13:15] Kevin Morris: Yeah, we were somewhat surprised, maybe not surprised, but it was not something we were anticipating that over 60% of our respondents, uh, accepted both bids. And so on one hand, what this tells us is, you know, just that face value that people would pay for these strawberries as they’re described, and we describe them in a, in a fairly neutral way. We just say this hypothetical, one pound box of strawberries, they’re grown with a commitment to sustainable disposal practices. And so that can be biodegradable mulch films, for example, is one of them. But it can also be advanced recycling techniques, like Karl England’s group in work, in group number two. They’ve developed you know, ways to pelletize, turn the film into pellets, and then use that as a mechanical recycling fodder for asphalt for streets and things like that. And so that would also qualify as a commitment to sustainable disposal methods.
So, whether that’s biodegradable mulch films, advanced recycling, pyrolysis, et cetera, you know? Like we at face value, it definitely shows that consumers want to internalize this pollution externality. People know that plastic pollution is uniquely challenging. Microplastics and, you know, nanoplastics are much more of a, a kitchen table issue, I think. I think they’re kind of a more common name than they used to be at least.
But one reason I say that it’s, not, not surprising but not totally expected is, um, I guess probably something we have to, we always have to address anybody doing this type of research, is we’re dealing with a, a hypothetical good. So, people know they can go to the grocery store and buy Driscoll’s fresh strawberries there in the grocery store. But the strawberries as we’re describing them, grown with a commitment to sustainable disposal practices, don’t exist in the grocery store. And so, we’re asking people what they would pay without really observing their purchase decision. And so, your kind of not really asking people—if I can use the phrase—“to put their money where their mouth is.”
You know, it’s really easy to say or signal, “Of course I value these things.” And of course, we believe nobody would necessarily lie about our survey. Of course, people have these earnest beliefs. But when you’re asking people to actually start paying extra money out of their budget, then that can change behavior. You know, talking is cheap, but when you actually have to draw the money out of your budget, would you still make the same purchasing decisions?
And so in our survey what we have to do is we wanna add additional questions there for things like how certain of you… are you of your bidding process? So, the question immediately after the bidding procedure is, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how certain are you of your answers?” And what we found is that people who were more certain of their answers were more likely to respond, “Yes, yes.” And so, this sort of addresses that criticism where people might say, “Well, you’re asking them, would you pay more for something that doesn’t exist? You’re not actually asking them to fork over the money right now.” And then what we can say is, “Well, that’s true. That’s a criticism of this type of research in general.”
But the people who are most certain of their answers are the ones who say that they would pay this, this premium. And so that gives us a little more confidence than this. Yes, that’s a lot of people to say yes to both bids, but there is some evidence there in our survey to say that, well, these are just. Without putting my personal finger on the scale, uh, my opinion doing this research is that these people really hold these beliefs earnestly.
[00:16:50] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: And okay, so your main result, shows that average willingness to pay is about $5.14 per box. So first, tell what the box means. Is it the pound or what it is? And then what does this number actually mean for growers and for strawberry industry?
[00:17:10] Kevin Morris: Yeah. That’s a really that’s a really important question. So yeah, so the willingness to pay $5.14 per box, that’s per 1 pound box. And so yeah, we kind of have to standardize the 1-pound box because obviously as you, you go to Costco and buy the wholesale amount of strawberries, you’re gonna have these wholesale prices kick in. So, we have to standardize our 1-pound box.
But so, but more importantly, like your question, what does this mean for, you know, for growers and for the strawberry industry? Well, first off, one thing we always have to caveat is this willingness to pay $5.14 per box retail price. So, if we’re talking to growers, strawberry industry, what we’re saying is this is the retail price premium. This would be separate from the price premium received directly from growers, right? So naturally, the idea being growers, they sell their product to a co-op at a certain rate, like Driscoll’s or whoever, and then they go to Walmart or retailers, and then they negotiate selling the retail price. So, the retail price isn’t necessarily what the growers get, but it translates though, if a higher price at the retail end is going to translate to a higher price for growers.
But it also means that I think if I can get a little more conceptual here, it’s that, there is benefit to taking this risk of using biodegradable mulch films. Like, I think one of the, one of the more hindrances for growers is, well, I have to change my production methods, try something I haven’t tried before, and if it doesn’t work, well, we plant for the season, so I can’t just go back out tomorrow and start over, right? You’re already in the season. So naturally there’s gonna be some risk aversion for growers because of the fragile nature of, how careful you have to be when you’re planting. I shouldn’t say fragile necessarily, but they have to be very purposeful with their actions.
So, when we talked about this number for, for, for, for growers in particular, I think what it says is maybe you don’t change your whole operation over. Maybe, like we talked to Rich Udo, a few years ago at Monterey for one of our, uh, in-person quarterly meetings, and he was experimenting with biodegradable mulch films on a kind of a subplot of his farm. So still keeping the main operation the way they normally do, but trying out biodegradable mulch films and getting the hang of them, and then maybe, the opportunity presents itself to grow these strawberries and actually kind of reap the benefits, the profits from that price premium.
And so I think, what we can kind of communicate to growers in the strawberry industry with this information is that, there, there is a, there is an incentive for you to meet consumers where they are, which is to say that when consumers really place strong value on reducing the plastic waste pollution externality, we say, which is the idea that, the production of these goods, a byproduct of that is we get plastic pollution in our soils, we get it in our oceans, our streams, things like that, totally as an accidental byproduct. I can say I get utility, I get value, I get pleasant feelings when I know that the things I’m purchasing, uh, commit or when I know I get a positive feeling or I get positive utility when the goods I’m purchasing maybe it costs twenty-five cents extra, but I know that by purchasing this, I’m signaling to the company that I want you to continue taking these steps in the right direction on climate change, on plastic pollution.
It’s a little anecdote from my growing up. My dad was a commercial fisherman in Alaska for pretty much all of his life, and he, he fished in different parts of the world. But when the Exxon Valdez spill happened in the, in the, 80s, he was impacted because he was a salmon fisher in, Prince William Sound. And so there, for anybody who kind of remembers that scenario that whole situation, it was captain negligence that caused a massive oil spill, shut down fisheries, massive environmental damage. All these fishermen got lots of settlements because they were put out of work.
But Kenneth Arrow, a very famous economist, so the, the root of some of this willingness to pay research really comes from, some of its origins come from, okay, how do we ask people, “What would you be willing to pay to make sure something like this never happened again?” And so how do we put a value on environmental damage?
But that whole anecdote is basically just to say that growing up, my dad, he was very careful not to buy gas from Exxon-Mobil or Chevron stations because in his heart of hearts, he got utility from not, you know patronizing companies that he thought contributed to these environmental damages through negligence. And, you know, I think we can kind of—that doesn’t apply to the strawberry industry. There’s no negligence at hand. Let me be totally clear—but I think- the whole idea that people internalize environmental damage and are willing to vote with their wallet, so to speak, to abate those damages in the future is I think it’s a serious feeling, and it’s not something that’s a result of, well, you’re asking people what they would pay. You’re not recording their purchasing decision. I think it provides incentive for these companies to go, “Okay, we’ll take the risk, and we’ll try something new or something we’re not used to,” because there’s this cushion there. People want this, and there’s a financial incentive as well.
[00:22:38] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: So, another thing that I wanted to ask you, if you think that your findings align with the previous research on biodegradable mulches and eco-labels, and how does your study actually add any new evidence to the literature?
[00:22:47] Kevin Morris: Right. So, okay, yeah. This is a really important question. So yeah, our results are, are basically in line with previous literature. You can find, across various products and types of goods, this, uh, contingent valuation method for any prospective researchers. A lot of this research finds positive willingness to pay for these hypothetical goods. But exactly what you kind of brought up about eco-labeling.
So, um, yeah, let’s say we have this box of strawberries, and there’s this commitment to sustainable disposal practices, and people are willing to pay for that. How do you communicate that to people? How do you, it’s eco-label. It’s labels, of course, right? You have to have some credible labeling on the box. And you have to have some sort of regulatory organization that can say that, “Yeah, this box of strawberries really was grown with the commitment to these disposal practices,” separate from a way that your, your average box of strawberries isn’t.
And so, a lot of economic research has to do with the labeling itself too. Even outside of the contingent valuation stuff, just credible signaling from the labeling and people having faith in sort of the institutions that do the labeling as well, knowing that, that they’re actually being applied in earnest and things like that.
So yeah, I think given that our results align with previous research, sort of the natural follow-up is you’re gonna have to have credible labeling, sort of in the way that you can go buy ground coffee and you can buy a certified Free Trade coffee, or you can buy products with packaging that was made from recycled content and things like that. It’s one thing to say that you do those things, but if you can credibly label it on the package and really communicate that to consumers in a confident way, that’s, that’s a really important second part of this because anybody can claim, “Oh, ours, we do all these things to reduce plastic pollution.” But I think people can be—especially people with concerns about environmental damage—there is some cynicism or there is some sort of… Like for me, I could say, people might wanna reap the rewards. They’re talking about the talk, but they are walking the walk? And so, this whole idea of, labeling is gonna be really key to making sure that these reported retail premiums really are something that growers, can see and really, therefore having some behavior altering in the margins
[00:25:11] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Right. Yeah, well, and one more question that I have for you, and I think it’s quite interesting and important. So. If you could, if you could give one takeaway to policymakers or industry groups right now, what would you want them to understand from this research?
[00:25:31] Kevin Morris: Yeah, that’s a really good question. That’s thoughtful. Yeah.
I, I admit that as a researcher doing this research—and we kind of talked about this before we started recording—it’s the whole idea of you spend all your years doing all this work and putting together your, your dissertation, your academic commitments, and then you write the paper, and then does it just sit on a shelf for other academics to read and never make its way to the policymakers or the industry groups?
And this is a really important question, and I think the key understanding here is that we can ins- we can hasten, we can speeding up the adoption of these technologies that, that we know reduce plastic pollution; biodegradable mulch films, commitments to advanced recycling techniques like pyrolysis or the advanced mechanical recycling techniques—which I think are really exciting—turning that film into pelletized, pavement, asphalt pavement. I think some of that stuff is incredible. But these ideas are great, but how do we get people to adopt this on a mass scale? How do we get everybody walking the walk, I guess, so to speak?
And at the end of the day, I hate to sound like an economist, but it’s a financial incentive, I think, pure and simple. If we want people to alter their behavior and take these risks—’cause growers, when we ask them to grow their strawberries with this commitment to disposable practices, we’re asking them to change what they do, and maybe they’ve been doing it this way for a really long time, and they’re not gonna, they’re not gonna change what they do because we say pretty please—and so I think my biggest takeaway for policymakers and industry groups is that the credible labeling along with the willingness to pay analysis, I think the combination of the promise of the price premium and being able to credibly communicate that to growers and industry groups, I think there’s a real opportunity here to see the adoption of new green technologies in a way that we haven’t always seen before.
And sometimes they kind of come too little too late, or maybe they come to kind of make up for the fact of, “Oh, we’ve had a reputation for doing environmental damage, so now we need to do some PR work.” And I think my biggest takeaway as just a researcher and maybe someone who’s a bit naive here is that I think we can really make a, a strong difference simply by communicating the incentives to growers and to policymakers. And I think that it’s not asking consumers to foot the bill, so to speak. We’re only asking consumers what you would be willing to do. But we if we can close the information gap, I think we can have better outcomes for everybody. We can have less pollution in the soil for growers. We can incentivize them to take, uh, new production methods by sort of compensating them for the risk of using new technologies. And then we’re not asking consumers to sort of pay anything they wouldn’t self-report to pay.
And I think that’s this is a, kind of a core function of either government or policymakers is to sort of take these two sides, consumers and growers, and take the information and get them to meet in the middle. And maybe propose some credible labeling for this type of product. And maybe get people really… maybe once this hits the market more growers start to produce these strawberries because they’re revenue maxing. And that’s a little cut and dry cynical way to look at things. But I, I think if change is what we’re after—and as researchers, that’s separate from my objectives as a researcher, we’re very impartial and so forth—but as a graduate student, as, Kevin Morris just talking to you, I think if we’re really after change, we need to close these information gaps, and I think that’s a real opportunity for, for policymakers.
[00:29:03] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Yeah. Right. And tend to agree that there are a lot of information gaps, and I usually say gaps that I like to build a bridge between science and public. And I think you have a very good explanation of the same sort of misinformation that we do a lot of research, we have a lot of data, we have a lot of great information. But if that information is not being brought up to people who actually can help to make the change, the information just sits on the top of the shelves basically. So that information gap you’re talking about is a great point, my personal opinion.
[00:29:41] Kevin Morris: Exactly. And it’s kind of like what you do for our, our research group, right? We all do this research, but it doesn’t get out there. And sort of like what your working group, I feel like, does for a lot of us. Like what this podcast does for us is it allows us to get this out there. And so, it’s such an important role, and it doesn’t always… I mean I shouldn’t say it doesn’t get the attention it deserves, but I just think it’s such an important role. And yeah, it’s really great that you’re doing this too. I think the kind of the natural, natural continuation of what you’re doing is, “Yeah, we just have to keep getting this to, uh, the biggest audience we can, right?”
[00:30:16] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Yes. Thank you. Yes, because like, like we discussed earlier, we can do what we do as scientists and researchers. We can publish our information and present it at the conferences, but it might not be always enough in perspective of spreading information to more people. Not everybody reads academic papers and not everybody attends conferences.
[00:30:43] Kevin Morris: Exactly. And I know even me as a PhD student, I read papers. I should read more papers. So, I have to imagine that if it weren’t my job to read papers, I probably wouldn’t read very many of them. So yeah, it’s kind of like, uh, if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound, if you do all this research and have all these great results, well, if nobody’s around to be influenced by it, does it really? yeah. So, it’s really important. I’m really glad to be on the podcast. I think what you’re doing is really important, and it’s really great to, uh, think that we can, we can change some hearts and minds hopefully with our, with our work.
[00:31:17] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Thank you. Thank you so much, Kevin. And well, thank you for your time and great information. And also, I will be reaching out to you and Suzette because I believe—Yes there is another survey with results coming up at some point in fall, so maybe we can catch up and have another episode of this information presented.
[00:31:37] Kevin Morris: Yes, 100%. I don’t wanna speak for Suzette, of course. But we have our grower survey coming out very soon. With this survey, uh, the one we’re talking about, we’ll have some enhanced methodology even to be able to showcase. So yeah, I hope we get to hear from you again down the line. I think we’ll have some really good updates. And SNF survey will be on the grower side rather than talking about the consumer side, maybe we’ll get to talk about the other side of the coin, too.
[00:32:05] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: Yeah. That’s great. Well, thank you, Kevin. And I also wanted to remind our listeners that all information that is being published by our team members is available on the project website, that it’s open access, and anybody can read that as well. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks a lot.
[00:32:26] Kevin Morris: Oh, thank you so much, Nataliya. This was a great opportunity, and we’re really grateful.
[00:32:29] Nataliya Shcherbatyuk: That’s it for today and until the next episode. You can find more information by following us on Instagram and LinkedIn by @mulch_matters and going to our websites (www.smallfruits.wsu.edu) and choose ‘Mulch Technologies’. This work is supported by Specialty Crops Research Initiative Award 2022-51181-38325 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed on this podcast are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Intro and outro music credit to Zakhar Valaha from Pixabay