Strawberry growers weathering recent stretch of heat, rain and humidity

A sunny sky was seen throughout the Santa Maria Valley on Tuesday, bringing warm temperatures to the area.

However, the weather was dramatically different from the past weekend, which featured record-breaking heat in many areas of the Central Coast.

The excessive heat, along with uncharacteristic rain and humidity, did more than just make people uncomfortable, it presented a whole slew of challenges to lower strawberry growers.

“The weather was terrible for growing berries,” said grower Ryan Harrison. “It makes it difficult to grow quality strawberries in those conditions.”

The Red Dog Managment agribusiness general manager said the wild weather took a big hit of production.

“We’re thinking somewhere around 20 percent of our crop will be damaged,” said Harrison.

The loss, which adds up to thousands of dollars, comes from several factors, including the hot temperatures.

“When the strawberries are harvested at maturity, when the temperatures are above 85 to 90 degrees, they bruise very easily and that will leave little fingermarks on the fruit,” said Harrison.

He added that fruit harvested in high temperatures, which are then transported to cooling facilities are affected negatively as well.

“It ends up reducing the shelf life of the fruit that gets sent to the market,” Harrison said.

The thin-skinned nature of strawberries is also problematic.

“Most fruit that’s on a south facing side of the bed will get completely sunburned,” Harrison said. “So we had some fruit loss from sunburn.”

In addition to the heat, unexpected rain and humidity also complicated matters.

The combination, highly unusual for the Santa Maria Valley in early September, could pose a risk to fruit still on the vine maturing.

“What’s going to happen is that high level of humidity will increase the mildew and botrytis, which are two common strawberry diseases or conditions that degrade the fruit,” said Harrison.

Harrison noted it could be a few day before those conditions are present, but currently, he’s not seeing any signs.

Extreme humidity was not only a challenge for fruit, more importantly, it also created difficult work conditions for field workers.

“The humidity was intense,” Harrison said. “The humidity levels is like this heavy weight that’s on your shoulders and tough for our harvesters to get through the day.”

To help out, schedules and work loads were reduced. Harrison said harvesting lasted only from 7 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

“We didn’t want to put our workers under that intense conditions, ” Harrison said, who also added Cal/OSHA regulations also mandate certain safety precautions.

With a number of issues to juggle, Harrison is concerened about the impact on fall produciton.

“We really count on our fall,” said Harrison. “It’s normally a good pricing and good volume, and so this is another challenge for us to overcome.”

He’s now hopeful fruit that is harvested and sent to market will be able to make up for those that did not.

“We need the market to react and pricing to go up for us to pull this off,” Harrison said. “That will help soften the blow of lost production from this.”

Helping the cause is an appealing weather forecast that signals cooler weather is on the way.

“We’re looking forward to getting back to mid-70 degree days for Santa Maria,” said Harrison. “The mid-to-low 50’s are ideal strawberry growing weather. The next 10 days look to be a more favorable forecast.”