Strawberry growers ponder outlook after large crop

Despite having finished one of the most productive years on record, California strawberry farmers say they remain uneasy about the outlook of their business, as they grapple with rising production costs, a dwindling labor force and the loss of an important production tool.

For this year at least, California strawberry plantings appear to be holding steady, after a three-year trend of declining acreage.

"I think there's a lot of trepidation about the future," said Chris Matthews, farm manager of Garroutte Farms in Watsonville.

With concerns about minimum-wage increases and new overtime requirements for farm employees, he said strawberry acreage on his farm has been flat for the last several years and he does not expect it will grow much "until we get past these hurdles and see how these labor laws are going to hit us."

What has been encouraging, Matthews said, is the good yields that growers have been able to achieve even as they've reduced their acreage, although he lamented the larger fruit volumes also meant lower market prices.

"I think if we had less production last year, you would've seen a bigger retraction in acreage for this upcoming year," he said.

Despite the drop in state acreage, favorable weather and new higher-yielding strawberry varieties that are coming online helped growers produce a robust crop last year, said Carolyn O'Donnell of the California Strawberry Commission. Even though a rainy winter slowed production early on, she noted the new varieties allowed production to surge in the fall, when volumes typically dip.

"What we've found is that some of these new varieties respond to weather a little bit differently," she said. "That's why the 2016 production stayed up above what was the predicted three-year average curve."

San Diego County grower Neil Nagata said newer varieties have definitely allowed for more summer plantings, which have boosted production, but those increases have not been in his growing region, where acreage has continued to decline. On his farm, he was growing about 100 acres of strawberries two years ago, but he's now down to fewer than 10 acres, having switched to growing more blueberries and cherimoyas.

Because of his region's short growing window, the southern district now represents less than 2 percent of the state's strawberry production. Aside from weather issues that have hurt his production, Nagata said the high cost of water and labor has made it much more difficult for him to compete against strawberries from Mexico.

"There's also not enough labor around and we've suffered as a result of that," he said.

What may help, he said, is availability of new short-day varieties such as Fronteras, allowing growers in Southern California to produce more fruit over a short period of time. Since Fronteras was released in 2014, Nagata said he's just starting to use it, but added that it appears to be "a very good variety" that may give support to growers with short growing seasons.

Research efforts have also turned to developing strawberry varieties with improved genetic resistance to soil-borne disease. These efforts have become more urgent with the loss of methyl bromide, which remains the most effective tool for controlling weeds and soil-borne pathogens.

This is the first year the fumigant will no longer be available for use in the field. Although there's been a gradual phase-out of the material since 1994, strawberry growers have been able to access limited amounts of methyl bromide under a critical-use exemption.

Without methyl bromide, farmers will now be dealing with more disease pressure in their fields, said Watsonville grower Tom Am Rhein, adding that it may be one reason they're being conservative about increasing their strawberry plantings.

"There are fields now that are totally out of production because they're infested to the point where you can't grow strawberries in them," he said.

Having grown up in the business, Bill Reiman, who farms in Oxnard, said some of the diseases that are common in strawberries today didn't use to exist because of methyl bromide.

"When I was younger, I had to go far and wide to see a dead strawberry plant in a California strawberry field," he said. "Today, just about every field has a dead plant or two. We spend a lot more on weed control these days and we lose some production to soil-borne pathogens."

Growers have been switching to alternative materials and production methods, but they say so far none of them work as well as methyl bromide.

"I think the most promising control measure we have is the new varieties," said Gerald Holmes, director of the Cal Poly Strawberry Center. "There's a real paradigm shift in the (plant) breeding community where there's a tremendous amount of focus on breeding for disease resistance to these soil-borne pathogens."

Researchers at Cal Poly and the University of California have been working on disease-resistant varieties and doing field trials, O'Donnell said, but it usually takes five to seven years to bring a new variety to market.

In the meantime, there are some new products that show promise, Holmes said. One is the bio-fumigant Dominus, but it has yet to be registered for use in California. O'Donnell said some growers are also trying techniques such as anaerobic soil disinfestation, and ground rotation remains an important practice, especially for organic producers.

Farmer Matthews said it will be a few years before growers see the full impact of methyl bromide's retirement, as fields that have been fumigated should stay clean for three years. That means the current crop that was planted last year will still benefit from methyl bromide.

"The first year out of the gate, you're not going to see a difference, but you wait five to 10 years out and we're going to know the true story," he said.

(Ching Lee is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. She may be contacted at clee@cfbf.com.)