We didn’t get clear directions.
“Just come down Futch Road,” Fancy Farms owner Carl Grooms told Plant City Times & Observer and In the Field Publisher Karen Berry in a phone call earlier in the week.
We are in Berry’s 4Runner. In the Field Editor Sarah Holt is in the passenger seat. I’m in the back with my nose pressed against the window. In the three years I’ve covered the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World I’ve been on many farms, but I haven’t been able to see the planting process from the beginning — the very beginning.
The seeds haven’t been dropped in the beds yet. Some of the fields haven’t even had beds made out of their soil.
Berry pulls onto the farm. Carl Grooms is nowhere in sight. She is determined to find him. We bypass the paved road to the other side of the farm and charge onto the makeshift path between fields. The dirt has been trampled by trucks and tractors. Tread prints are ankle deep.
Her tires start spinning.
“Don’t worry, we have four-wheel drive,” Berry says.
“Just don’t get stuck in Carl’s field,” Holt says. “He’ll never let you live it down.”
When we don’t find him by the old tractor parts, we turn around. Berry points out the red and blue plastic plates that are under each sprinkler head on the beds. I haven’t noticed them on any other farm I’ve been to.
“The first time I met Carl he told me those are UFOs,” Berry says.
UFOs?
“He wouldn’t tell me what they are really for,” Berry says. “He just kept saying they were to communicate with the UFOs.”
We finally find a secluded plot hidden by a trees. There are farmhands, busy digging and draping and driving, on the opposite side of the 15 acres. Carl Grooms pulls up in an F-250 behind us as if the UFOs had told him our exact location.
“How’s it feel to be lost in the woods?” He hoots under his signature white beard.
His sense of humor doesn’t stop there. After 43 years of growing strawberries, he has enough stories to tell to rival stand-up comedian Jeff Foxworthy.
He admits he knows Spanglish, including a slew of bad words he hears from his Mexican farmhands. They’ve seen alligators on some of the dirt roads made to navigate the farm. And, one time, a news reporter backed into a 4-foot-deep ditch.
“Plenty of news reporters get stuck on freeze nights,” he says.
A sliver of skin on his chest is showing from his unbuttoned denim shirt, and he has a flip phone that looks like it’s from 2005 in a case clipped to his waist.
“I don’t text, flip, switch, swipe, squirt, push, tap,” Carl Grooms says.
With a 230-acre farm to run, who has time for Facebook and mobile WiFi? The fields are his passion. To run it takes work — and he’s not shy about putting Holt and me to work.
He helps us into the tractors. We meet 28-year-old domestic worker Felix Ramirez, who is making beds, and Carl Grooms’ son, Dustin Grooms, who is laying plastic behind Ramirez. Lucky for me, I get to ride in the air-conditioned cab.
When the bumpy ride is over, we get to work shoveling the edge of a bed. Each bed needs to start and end at equal places to install irrigation lines. Digging into the compressed dirt in the Florida sun is more like doing a CrossFit routine in the middle of a mud run. I’m starting to feel silly for doing my hair this morning.
To think, these guys do this tough labor day after day in a game of strawberry roulette. No one can predict how the season will go: the weather, the prices, the reliability of the labor.
But Grooms takes it in strides.
“As long as everybody’s keeping up, then this will flow,” Grooms says.
Still, there’s one last question on my mind. What are those red and blue plates for?
“Years ago it was to keep the elephants out of the field,” Grooms says. “They love strawberries. All those circus elephants and the ones at Busch Gardens. It keeps them out.”
I guess we’ll never know Carl Grooms’ strawberry-growing secret.
Contact Amber Jurgensen at ajurgensen@plantcityobserver.com.