Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
And yet finding a berry with true flavor - the kind that stops you in your tracks when
you taste it - just keeps getting harder. There is a solution, though. Despite the fact that
California has an overwhelming commercial edge, strawberries are one of the most widely
grown farmers' market fruits. And this is one case where the old "buy local; buy seasonal"
mantra really pays off.
Locally grown berries, which don't have to make a crosscountry trek before you can
eat them, will almost always be juicier and more flavorful than their commercial coun-
terparts - even if they're grown from the same variety. And fortunately, strawberries are
almost uniquely fitted for small farmers. Although they demand a lot of extremely tedious
handwork to grow, they offer among the highest cash returns to farmers.
So lucrative are strawberries that even in these days of consolidation and ever bigger
farms, it's possible for a grower to make a living on less than ten acres. That's why straw-
berries are the overwhelming favorite of urban farmers - those hardy souls who practice
agriculture in the small, often temporary open spaces found in cities. You can find farm-
ers growing strawberries on a couple of acres under power lines, and you can find them
tending their fields on land that is being cleared for housing developments (in these cases,
strawberry fields are definitely not forever).
This friendliness to small-scale, transient farming is the reason behind one of the more
interesting chapters in the history of American strawberry farming. At the turn of the cen-
tury, when the California strawberry industry was just becoming established, it was heav-
ily populated by Japanese immigrants. The labor-intensive, highly profitable farming was
ideal for growers with extended families. Furthermore, these growers were able to turn
another of the strawberry's weaknesses to their advantage. Strawberries are susceptible to
all kinds of pests, many of which were not controlled until after the advent of chemical
pesticides after World War II. Verticillium wilt is particularly vexing. Until the 1950s the
soilbound fungus that causes the wilt would kill any strawberry field that remained planted
in the same location for more than a couple of years. This vulnerability forced strawberry
growers to be a highly mobile lot, and most of them rented land rather than owning it.
The situation was ideal for Japanese American growers, because in the early part of the
twentieth century, it was illegal for them to own land in California. These growers turned
two negatives into a positive by focusing on strawberries. A survey taken in 1910 found
that almost 80 percent of the strawberry growers in Los Angeles County were Japanese
American. When the Central California Berry Growing Association, the first strawberry
marketing co-op, was founded in 1917, the bylaws required that half of the board of dir-
