Strawberry Growers Crushed by Freeze, Media Coverage

A ripe strawberry damaged by recent rains.

As if January’s freeze wasn’t harsh enough on Florida berry growers, now they are being portrayed as “selfish” and “greedy” in some news reports. It’s a portrayal growers say is unfair and inaccurate.

First it was famine – the January freeze damaged and delayed Florida’s strawberry crop. Now it’s feast – Mother Nature’s April Fools’ joke - too many Florida berries on the market at the end of their traditional five-month growing season.

The glut meant it didn’t make economic sense for some growers to harvest their berries. It costs about $5 a flat just to pick, package and store the fruit, according to experienced growers. So some berry farmers started pulling up the plants to make room for their spring vegetable seedlings that are already planted in the strawberry beds.

But what is the cycle of life for a farmer became the lead story for some news outlets. An ABC News report accused strawberry farmers – growers say unfairly – of throwing away food while Americans go hungry. The report showed workers chopping out the strawberry plants and included comments from the public calling the growers “selfish” for not sharing their unpicked fruit.

“This tears your heart out as growers because they’re all very sensitive to these issues,” said Ted Campbell, executive director of the Florida Strawberry Growers Association. He took special offense to the ABC report because it went to a Miami soup kitchen to get public reaction.

“I told ABC News, basically, if there were some way to magically fly these strawberries from a field to a homeless shelter 500 miles away without inflicting a cost on someone, we would have found out how to do that,” Campbell said.

Overlooked is that many Florida growers who would have lost money paying pickers to harvest actually opened their fields to non-profit groups and for individuals to pick their own fruit.

Carl Grooms, manager of Fancy Farms in Plant City, invited the 4-H club to pick berries for free on some of his 225 acres.

“They actually picked about 10,000 quarts of strawberries, but on that given day, I probably had about 300,000 quarts of berries in the field,” Grooms said. “The concept of volume is what the general public don’t understand.”

News reports also give the misperception that the strawberry crop is harvested only once after planting. In reality, strawberry fields are picked on average twice a week for a four- to five-month period. Even during the freeze, berries were being harvested, just not as many.

This week, Grooms had pickers at work to fulfill a special order. His fields are still lush with ripe red berries. But many will have to be turned into juice, because last week’s rains caused them to crack. He says rain damages far more strawberries than freezes ever have.

Grooms is luckier than most. He markets his berries through Wish Farms , the largest supplier of Florida strawberries. The berries that don’t make it to market are frozen or processed into juice.

“The biggest misconception is that growers are intentionally wasting food,” said Gary Wishnatzki, president and CEO of Wish Farms. “The growers are just doing what they can to survive this year.”

Survival for the berry farmers means making way for spring melons, squash, peppers and cucumbers.

“That’s one of the things people are seeing, the plants chopped out," Wishnatzki said. "People think, 'Well, the growers are just wasting this food.' No, they’re not. They’re letting the melon plant come in.

"Two months from now, there are going to be melons in the stores, and if they didn’t take the strawberry plants out, that melon plant would suffer and not grow."

Wishnatzki said the freeze delayed the berry season, but it hurt more than the farmers. The lack of a steady crop has hit farm workers even harder.

“That’s one of the parts of the story that has not been focused on, the plight of the workers this year,” Wishnatzki said.

To help, he opened one of his fields last Saturday. The public could pick an unlimited amount of strawberries for a $1 donation. Wishnatzki raised more than $6,000 for the Redlands Christian Migrant Association.

Wishnatzki said he takes his responsibility to his workers, his growers, and to consumers very seriously. That’s why a lot of recent media coverage upset him.

“Nobody likes to waste food, especially a farmer who has spent a lot of time nurturing this crop along," Wishnatzki said. "It’s like their children, and nobody likes to abandon and see it waste in the field.”

The news brightened a bit this week. Wishnatzki said the chain grocery stores responded to the growers' plight and are planning some big strawberry sales that will keep growers picking and workers earning a paycheck.