California GArden Archives

Growing Grounds from California Garden

© SAN DIEGO FLORAL ASSOCIATION

These stories may not be published in any form or copied onto another media without written permission from San Diego Floral Association.

Reprinted From: March/April 2023 Volume 114 No. 2

Strawberries in California

Part One

By John Blocker 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, at a friendly breakfast at nurseryman Thomas Loftus’ ranch in Shasta County, the California strawberry “Gold Rush” was launched. As the story is told, Loftus’ 9-year-old son, Charlie, served guest Louise Herman a strawberry growing on the ranch. She was the sister of strawberry pioneer Ed Reiter, and recognized the strawberry as being sweeter, bigger, and a brighter red than her brother was growing further south in Parajo Valley near Watsonville. 

Reiter, with his friend Dick Driscoll, soon entered into an agreement with Loftus to propagate those strawberries from his ranch. They named it the Banner variety. In 1904, they planted their first field with the berry and had great success. The berry was not only popular with the public but produced well and was somewhat disease resistant. They were the only farmers growing the Banner variety until 1912, when, with no plant patent laws on the books, other growers began introducing the variety into their fields. 

Reiter and Driscoll helped pass plant patent protections in 1930 and began promoting new strawberry varieties through a business they founded. Still in business today, the company called “Driscoll’s” now creates new varieties for their members and ships berries for their growers. Driscoll’s controls about one-third of the domestic berry market, which includes all other berries such as blueberries, raspberries and blackberries.

Japanese Strawberry Growers

Japanese immigrants began arriving in California around 1900. Initially, they took any job available; then many turned to farming. Strawberries—intensively planted and producing high yields per acre—became a favorite crop. By 1910, almost 80 percent of the strawberry farmers in Los Angeles were Japanese. San Diego was the same.

San Diego’s preeminent scholar of Japanese immigrant history, Donald H. Estes, wrote about the period after 1910 in Before the War: The Japanese in San Diego:

“As the business community developed, farmers like Owashi Sataro, Ozaki Toraichi, and Tsunada Joshichi were growing tracts of vegetables and strawberries within the city [San Diego].ˮ

The market boomed as refrigerated rail cars were able to ship the fragile berry into outlying areas. During the 1920s, Takenaka Minejiro, one of the first Japanese growers in North County, grew bell peppers, strawberries, and lemon seedlings on his 500-acre ranch.

By 1940, Japanese farmers produced 95 percent of the strawberries grown in Southern California. Before World War II started, all growers in California produced 27 million pounds of strawberries—but in 1944, only 7.5 million pounds were produced. The Japanese population at the beginning of the war had been removed from the West Coast to internment camps such as Poston or Manzanar. Many families lost all their holdings.

At the conclusion of the war, Driscoll’s recruited Japanese growers to return to coastal California to restart the strawberry industry, signing 300 families from the Poston camp alone. Sheehy Berry Farms in Santa Maria offered Japanese immigrant families free housing and rice. 

Disaster, Crop Recovery, and Magic Gas

At the war’s end in 1945, the University of California had created five new strawberry varieties that soon supplanted the widely grown Banner variety. 

In 1947, strawberry production stood at 37 million pounds. By 1950, harvesting was at an all-time high at 81 million pounds. In 1956, the Salinas Valley’s 22,000 acres became the largest strawberry-growing area in the world.

Disaster hit in 1957. Within five years, production dropped to 9,000 acres largely due to a Verticillium wilt outbreak thought to be due to keeping plants in the soil for multiple years and planting strawberries in fields where Verticillium-susceptible crops such as tomatoes and potatoes had been grown. University of California researchers came to the rescue, determining through field trials that newly developed fumigants not only eliminated Verticillium wilt, but increased yields from five tons per acre to a whopping 20 to 30 tons per acre—up to a six-fold increase.

The first strawberry fields were fumigated in 1961 with two new chemicals. Chloropicrin, essentially the potent component found in tear gas, combined with methyl bromide, an odorless, colorless, and very toxic gas, were both injected into soil under newly developed plastic tarps. The tarps contained the gases and raised soil temperatures to help the plants grow faster. Chloropicrin killed soil fungi and increased crop yields. Methyl bromide killed soil nematodes and weed seeds and increased the efficacy of chloropicrin. Methyl bromide accounted for 80–95 percent of the gas injected into the soil. The remedy was magical. 

By the end of the 1960s, most growers fumigated their fields each year prior to planting. This annual chemical sterilization meant that there was no need to rotate crops into different fields. Production and profits soared. 

The use of the combination of methyl bromide and chloropicrin to fumigate fields prior to planting strawberries established an industry that thrived for decades. Sandy soils and cool coastal growing areas proved ideal for growing berries after soil fumigation. With the introduction by University of California researchers of fruit that shipped well, California soon produced more than 80 percent of the nation’s strawberries. By the 1980s, strawberry growers were dependent on methyl bromide and chloropicrin to keep their yields and profits high, despite land value and lease cost increases that kept business costs rising. 

Chemical Consequences and Alternatives

In 1987, things changed in a big way. Nations around the world signed the Montreal Protocol, a treaty banning or limiting the use of chemicals that damage the Earth’s ozone layer. Ozone provides protection to all forms of life from harmful radiation. By 1991, the fumigant methyl bromide was declared an ozone depleter under the protocol agreement. Strawberry growers and all other users of methyl bromide would be required to scale back its use and eventually cease using it altogether.

Strawberry growers lobbied federal officials and received a Critical Use Exemption (CUE) that allowed continued use of the chemical until 2005. Hoping for a miracle, or in disbelief, or for other unexplained reasons, the industry had done very little to find an alternative by the 2005 deadline. Again, the industry lobbied for and was granted a CUE until 2015. This time more effort was put into finding an alternative.

Raising strawberries organically or using environmentally friendly pesticides and practices were all examined. The industry even considered growing strawberries in substrates such as coconut husks. But even when all known nutrients were made available to the plant’s roots, the coconut husk berries were mushy and did not taste good. Another problem for California strawberry growers is that if a good tasting berry is developed using substrate technology, strawberries could be grown anywhere, not just in California’s coastal sandy soils as they are today. 

Through experimentation, organic growing has become successful. Swanton Farms north of Santa Cruz is an outstanding example. The farmland there is relatively cheap, and there is enough land either to rotate the berry fields with crucifers such as broccoli or to let the land lie fallow. Crucifers emit a chemical into the soil that acts as a mild natural fumigant. Unfortunately, the coastal land most berry growers cultivate is too expensive and too limited in size to allow crop rotation. 

San Diego’s Strawberry Crop

In 1995, farmers grew 500 acres of strawberries in San Diego County. In 2021, that number had dropped to 200 acres. This decrease was largely due to urbanization rather than an inability to find an alternative to methyl bromide. Housing tracts and shopping malls have usurped farmland. 

As a third-generation grower, Oceanside’s Neil Nagata still produces strawberries today. Nagata is the founding president of the nonprofit California Strawberry Growers Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for children of farmworkers. Over the past 26 years, the fund has raised more than $2 million. In 2021, Neil Nagata was named “Farmer of the Year” by the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

Jimmy Ukegawa is also a third-generation strawberry farmer. His father at one time grew 1,500 acres of tomatoes along with 200 acres of strawberries in San Diego County. Today, Ukegawa operates Carlsbad Family Farms, which includes a U-pick strawberry field; four farmstands selling berries; and at Halloween both a corn maze and a pumpkin patch, selling pumpkins from the field. Carlsbad Family Farms is located along I-5 at Cannon Road. In 2021, the City of Carlsbad named Jimmie Ukegawa “Citizen of the Year” for his charitable work in the city, especially for donating food and setting up a food bank during COVID. 

To be continued in Part 2:  The practice of using extremely toxic chemicals to grow our food was developed in the 1960s. Today, killing every bit of living matter in the soil is antithetical to our present philosophy. We believe that promoting healthy soil fungal communities promotes healthy plant communities. But the reality right now is that nobody knows how to fix a Verticillium wilt or a Fusarium outbreak in the corner of a strawberry field except by using dangerous pesticides or by rotating other crops into the area until the soil is again safe for the berries. In the next issue, I will write about the impact that the loss of methyl bromide has had on the agricultural industry and the alternative methods in use today.

© SAN DIEGO FLORAL ASSOCIATION and © John Blocker.
These stories may not be published in any form or copied onto another media without written permission from San Diego Floral Association.