Farmers optimistic for successful year as peak Strawberry Season begins

SANTA MARIA, Calif. - With the calendar flipping to March later this week, the peak of strawberry season is now underway in the Santa Maria Valley, and so too is optimism for local farmers, who are hoping the crop will yield a successful harvest in 2025.

"Central Coast strawberry season is just starting to ramp up," said Randy Sharer, Satellite Farms owner. "We've gone through the cold weather and we're getting longer daylight now with good sunshine like this morning. We're really going to be hitting it in production here in the next few weeks."

Sharer, who has been farming in the Santa Maria Valley for more than 40 years pointed out that while there has been very little rain over the last several months, growing conditions for strawberries have not been adversely affected.

"Strawberries are extremely climate sensitive," said Sharer. "They need X-amount of hours of chill temperatures. Nighttime temperatures under 45 degrees. They also need dry weather because they're quite susceptible to any number of fungus and then we need good sunshine because there's nothing makes the world grow more than sunlight does."

He added that while rain is always welcome, having warm, sunny days as experienced on Wednesday, is a benefit to the growing season.

"Even though we're a in a dry year, we have had fairly optimal growing conditions for the strawberry crop this year," said Sharer. "Rain in March and early April does have an affect on the crop. That's when production is really starting to pick up. Strawberries do not do well in water, so once we get into production, we really like the clear days and that's when we really get after it."

Now that strawberries are beginning to hit their stride, Sharer is hoping 2025 will be a successful year for those in local agriculture business.

"Farmers basically start with the seed and do everything we can to get a product into the store and then ask how much the people pay for it, so farmers are overall generally a fairly optimistic group," said Sharer. "Now it's kind of like Christmas morning to where we're all ready and open the packages and that's packages are the red gems here behind me.