The Day the Strawberry Became King
They came here last week, the strawberry moguls. They set up shop in an airless banquet room, did their business quickly, and slipped out of town. No one noticed except the manager of the hotel coffee shop, who spread some strawberries around the tables to make the boys feel welcome.
Officially, it was the quarterly gathering of the California Strawberry Advisory Board. What they did for two days was preside over a kingdom that they have come to rule as surely as Carnegie once ruled steel. These men own the world of strawberries. They represent a type of farmer/mogul that seems to exist only in California--there also being tomato moguls, lettuce moguls and raisin moguls.
You might ask, doesn’t Kansas have its wheat moguls and the answer is yes, of course. But the Kansas wheat boys are forced to slug it out each year with Nebraska and South Dakota. The kind of California mogul I’m talking about doesn’t slug it out with anyone. Anymore. All other competitors have been reduced to a minor annoyance.
That’s more true of strawberries than any other major crop, although it wasn’t always that way. Just how the strawberry farmers clawed their way to the top is as much a California story as the discovery of gold.
We’ll get to the story, but first some strawberry facts: Three out of every four strawberries popped into someone’s mouth in this country comes from California. The runner-up state is Florida, and it produces about as many strawberries over an entire season as California produces in one week.
At peak season, the strawberry numbers for California are almost beyond comprehension. Growers here roll out 120 million pints every two weeks, or roughly enough to put a pint on the table of every household in America.
We so often hear numbers like these in California that we become numb to them. But 30 years ago, the numbers looked very different. California ranked 10th in production, behind states like Tennessee and Arkansas. Strawberries were regarded here as a hobby crop.
John Meichel rolled into Oxnard about that time, fresh off the boat from Germany, and decided to grow strawberries because there was no competition. In the entire state, about 350 acres were planted. “No one understood strawberries,” he says, “No one knew how to grow them right.”
Back then, Meichel says, he botched it time and again. Bugs would get the berries, plants would die from too much water or not enough. There was mildew and root rot. Strawberries forgave no mistakes.
That was when farmers made the decision that would turn them into moguls. They went to Sacramento and persuaded the state to establish the Strawberry Board. The board was a quasi-government agency composed of farmers who had the authority to tax every strawberry producer in the state.
In the beginning, the tax was a penny for every 12 pints of strawberries produced. The board collected the money and poured it into the agriculture departments at the University of California. Solve our problems, they said.
Soon, answers began coming back. Do this, don’t do that. Try these new varieties.
Most important, the researchers made full use of the enormous, natural advantage of California. Back East, the peak season for strawberries was six weeks. Here, it could be stretched to six months. So they developed strawberry types that kept blooming again and again. Yields rose from 10 tons an acre to 15 tons and then 25 tons.
They also introduced the farmers to the world of chemistry. There were treatments for every kind of bug, so many treatments that strawberries are now regarded as the most chemically intensive crop in California.
So the success of the California strawberry has not been without its cost. The strawberry moguls have become a target of the sponsors of Big Green, the environmental initiative, and the moguls definitely feel the heat. They spent half their time here looking at research proposals for new, benign bug killers.
And there are other problems. Success has attracted an abundance of first-time farmers. So many new acres have been put into production that the old-timers predict a coming shakeout.
But none of these men seriously thinks about quitting strawberries. They have the swagger and confidence of farmers who believe they grow the trickiest, most difficult crop on earth.
After the meeting ended, a vanload of moguls headed toward home. As the van passed fields filled with new squash, one grower gazed at the fields and remarked in wonder at their size.
His friend in the van never bothered to look. “Any bozo can grow squash,” he said.
