As Florida's strawberry season comes to a close this month, let's check in with a local grower on how it went.
"The market was really tough this season towards the end,” said Matt Parke, vice president of Parkesdale Farms.
The fourth-generation Florida farmer spoke with WUSF's Jessica Meszaros at one of his fields in Dover recently. The following is an edited transcription of that interview.
Discarded and dried up strawberry plants crunched under their feet as they walked through what is now a watermelon farm for the summer.
Let's talk a little bit about the season. So, when is strawberry season, typically?
We start picking in November, probably mid and then, depending on the market, we go through March … like our latest normally is by Easter we're done.
There's a lot of berries coming from a lot of different districts, not just ours, but we still had berries coming from Central Mexico … berries coming from California.
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When you have a lot of product, the price is low. And then you can get to a point of picking under your costs, like your returns will be less than your cost.
So, that's when you have to decide, do you continue to pick this way, hoping the market will turn around, or do you lick your wounds and get out of it?
Luckily, we got to go a little bit further. We barely came out financially, by the hair on our chins. But next year we hope for a better season.
Did the past hurricane season impact the strawberry season?
Yes, that was probably one of the biggest reasons we had a close to failure year at our farm. There's a lot of farms that did have failure years where they lost money. We were we were later at planting, because that was right at our planting time.
We got a direct hit. We were three quarters of a mile off the eye wall of Milton. We had almost 24 inches of rain in an eight-hour period, and we had sustained 110 mile-an-hour winds with gusts of 140.
We had some berries on the ground that went through the hurricane. We had 90 acres on the ground. Out of those 90 acres, we had to replace about 40 acres, and we also had to fix about 200 acres of plastic. So, all in all, we were about $3,500 to $3,800 an acre over budget this year.
Is there anything specifically from this last season that's going to impact how you grow this coming season?
The good thing about Florida is we have the right weather to be able to grow in the winter. And the problems that we have would be overabundance of moisture, which causes fruit rot, Botrytis.
If you're ever in a store and you see that gray mold on a on a berry, that's Botrytis. And when the fungi decides to take off, that's what it does.
It looks like we're losing one of our main chemistries for to combat Botrytis. In my opinion, it'll be devastating to our industry because our industry doesn't have anything to replace it yet that can combat fruit rot and to combat Pestalotia, which is another disease that our plants get.
The new varietals [of strawberry] that just came out, one of them is more resistant to Pestalotia and to Botrytis, in my opinion, the way the plant grows. So, we're going to implement that into our new growing strategy and try to increase the acres of those varietals.
Is there like a trend right now, with growers in general, moving away from the chemistry and becoming more kind of organic or biological?
It's not necessarily we're all moving that way. We're slowly and surely being pushed that way. And it's a very, very, very hard way to grow something and be profitable because of the diseases and the insect pressure that we have, not only here, but in every other state.
Is it being pushed by consumers who want more organic or like less chemicals, or is it like a regulation thing, or both?
It would be both.
The thing is a lot of people don't understand, consumers don't understand what that means, what farmers are going to have to try to do to get there.
And how much more that the product is probably going to end up costing at the end of the day because there's going to be less product available because we're going to be cut by at least half volume, if not more, when we eventually get totally that way.
There'll also be an increase in acreage because the way to combat all this is to add more acres to be able to have a plentiful harvest to be able to support the American consumer.
