“…It is assumed that a producer's challenge ranking is associated with an underlying utility level of satisfaction or perceived benefits. Producers ranked challenges according to the level of benefits they would receive if a solution to that challenge were provided (Yue et al, 2013(Yue et al, , 2014a(Yue et al, , 2014b(Yue et al, , 2014c. The producers' utility function was represented by the following: where a j is the producer's marginal utility from solutions to challenges j (j = availability/cost of labor for harvest activities; availability/cost of labor for preharvest activities; availability/ cost of intermediate supervisory labor, both harvest and preharvest; pests and diseases; weather; water; postharvest handling; food safety; productivity and profitability of available scion and rootstock cultivars; competing markets; and other challenges); b 12 is the marginal utility from the size of the operation; b 13 ; b 14 , and b 15 are the marginal utility from the state (Washington, Michigan, and New York, respectively) in which the operation is located; b 16 ; b 17; andb 18 are the marginal utility from the most trusted sources (university researchers and extension educators, agricultural service providers, and other growers, respectively) of information for applying precision agriculture technologies; and e ij is the error term, which is assumed to follow a normal distribution with a mean of 0 and standard deviation of s E .…”