Berry farmers getting squished
SALEM, Ore. – For decades it was a rite of spring, with platoons of young people fanning out across Western Oregon to pick up pocket money harvesting strawberries, and the farmers couldn’t grow enough.
Those days are fading fast.
“If you raised strawberries, why man, that was the product they really wanted,” said Jim Heater, a former head of the Oregon Strawberry Commission.
At the peak, in the 1950s, Oregon farmers cultivated more than 17,000 acres of the berries.
Labor costs, too few pickers and competition from California have dropped that to 2,000 acres now, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Former strawberry growers have moved on to more profitable crops.
Heater’s family farm raised strawberries in the Sublimity area for 49 years on land now used partly to grow Christmas trees.
Farmers who stick with strawberries admit it’s a tough business, especially because of an unreliable supply of pickers.
“Strawberries is one of those things like playing roulette. You can have a great crop, and nobody will show up to pick it,” said Bob Zielinski Jr., who grows about 20 acres of strawberries near Hopmere.
He has designs for a machine to do the job but no prototype yet.
Oregon State University researchers have developed some machines with mixed results.
Kevin Loe, whose Triangle Farms in Silverton gave up on strawberries about two years ago, doubts that growers ever will replace human hands.
A berry-picking machine, he said, would turn the fragile fruit into jam, where a lot of it ends up anyway.
Oregon strawberries have a short shelf life and most go to food processors rather than to supermarkets.
Loe got into the berries as many others were getting out. But production costs ate up his profits. “There’s no money in it,” Loe said.
Some Oregonians regard the California strawberries as poor substitutes for flavorful, local berries, but California prices are lower, and growers there plan to harvest 35,800 acres this year.
Despite the decline of Oregon acreage, the state was the third-largest producer in 2005, but with just 1 percent of the national production.
Beginning in the 1970s, federal rules banished grade-schoolers from the fields. State regulators then demanded that farmers keep detailed records and take payroll deductions.
By the 1980s, most farmers had switched to professionals, who could pick fast enough to earn minimum wage or better but are getting harder to find.
Don Youngblood, another former grower, calls it a loss for society.
“I can attest to a large number of students who learned the value of constructive work and how to take on responsibility by working on farms,” said Youngblood, who with his wife grew the berries near Dayton for 27 years.
Today they grow hazelnuts.