Local strawberry crops benefitting from recent rainy weather
SANTA MARIA, Calif. - Just as the peak of strawberry season is about to kickoff, local crops are benefitting from recent rainstorms that have repeatedly brought much-needed precipitation to the Central Coast.
"The rain this morning, it's always pleasant to get rain," Satellite Farms owner Randy Sharer said on Monday morning. "It's just a nice change of pace."
Santa Maria-based Satellite Farms is just one of many local businesses who help make up the prolific Santa Maria Valley strawberry industry.
According to the most recent Santa Barbara County Agricultural Report from 2023, strawberries continue to be by far and away the number one crop in the county.
With a gross crop value of $775 million two years ago, strawberries outpaced the next nine top crops combined.
With so much riding on the strawberry crop, the weather is an extremely important component of the growing process annually.
"Agriculture is always concerned about the timing of rain and the amount of rain," said Sharer. "We have a clear rain window and a rain season here along the Central Coast. Any diversion from that, then we have to alternate plans within our harvest and production schedule to modify them to fit within whatever Mother Nature throws at us."
Sharer pointed out that while the rain is always welcome in the agriculture industry, it can also prsent some challenges as well, especially for strawberries."
"Strawberries in particular are quite susceptible to any moisture sitting on the fruit," said Sharer. "That's why we go to the effort of covering the beds with the plastic mulch that we use to make sure that the fruit isn't sitting in moisture. If the fruit sits on a wet surface for very long it will rot the fruit."
Fortunately for local farmers, it looks like recent rain hasn't caused any significant issues over the past several weeks.
"Like anything else It depends on where you are and what varieties you're growing and what kind of ground you have," said Innovate Produce CEO Philip Adam. "We're blessed with a lot of different microclimates. In this area that lets us grow lots of different crops and some people having more advanced crop. They have a lot of red fruit on it, so they're having to do more preventative work to to keep that crop safe through the rain, whereas other people are later and they have a lot of small, not mature fruit where they won't be as worried about the rain."
As the rain has helped the crops flourish so far, precipitation further along on the calendar could present strawberry growers with come issues.
"Significant rain by say Easter, which is the 20th this year around that time frame can be quite challenging because the next six weeks the Central Coast will be the focal area of strawberry production in the world," said Sharer. "It could really be detrimental not only to our production schedules, but our harvesting schedule. The folks that we have that do the harvesting in this, it just slows them down. We all know what walking on mud is like and it's just detrimental on everything we do within the berry patch."
Adam agreed that weather has the potential to significantly impact the workplace and create additional concerns regarding much more than just the quality of the crops.
"This is a people business," said Adam. "Basically this time of year is when you start to see a lot of people out in the field and this is when we're really start to be mindful. Everyone's starting up and they might not be as used to to walking around, and also the fruit's really big, so sometimes people are trying to pick really fast because they have really big healthy fruit. We just got to remind everyone that safety is first, and make sure you're not slipping in the furrows in the mud. We do work outside, so that's always, always a thing we have to watch out for."
