Plant City is known as the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World. But the town isn’t living up to its name now. For the first time in its rich agricultural heritage, all U-picks have been cancelled because there are no more berries left in the fields.
In fact, all farms have sold out of the last of their crop in a record breaking year.
Literally, there are no strawberries left in Plant City.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Berry Operations Manager for Make-A-Wish Farms, Al Gone, said. “It’s been a blessing since we’ve had a couple of hard years here.”
Florida farms have had to fight for their place on the grocery scales. Competition from Mexico has inflated the market, driving prices down. The country’s climate is similar to Florida’s, thus, favorable for growing strawberries during the winter.
California has also brought the heat to the market. Its summer season has been extended, squeezing Plant City’s season from the other side.
In addition to an inflated market, labor costs have risen, causing fields to go unpicked and hundreds of acres of berries to expire in the warm Florida sun.
But this year was different.
“One day there were berries, the next, the fields were empty,” Barry Redd, executive director of the Tooty Fruity Growers Association, said.
Redd went into many Plant City fields to take measurements and document the conditions at the abrupt close of this season to see if there were any common factors, both environmental or operational, that could have led to this year’s success of sales and the unique produce phenomenon.
“It’s like they walked right off the field,” Redd said.
And that’s not a colloquialism. Through his research, Redd found small tracks, like little footprints, in the soil. In all farm cases, they led from the beds to the busiest main roads bordering the farms.
An unusually warm spring season has caused temperatures to rise to the 80s during the day and set off a string of allergy attacks that have residents racing to the pharmacy for relief. Both Redd and Gone think that these factors could have cause the first known Great Strawberry Migration, as the last of the strawberries did not want to rot in the field like their ancestors before them or succumb to allergy season.
Please scroll down.
APRIL FOOLS’!
If you got tricked and thought this was fun, please send a letter to the editor at ajurgensen@plantcityobserver.com. If you thought this was unprofessional, we want to hear from you, too. Please use “April Fools” as the subject line for emails.