Overview
The strawberry is a genus of over twenty species of low growing plants in the rose family and are found throughout the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere.[1] The crop consists of white flowers that produce a red edible piece of flesh on the enlarged flower receptacle, which technically classifies the strawberry as a seed rather than a berry.[2] Although initially the strawberry was cultivated in Europe during the 18th century, by the 19th century, countries consuming strawberries developed their own varieties specifically suitable for the climate, day length, altitude, and type of production required in the particular region. The plant succeeds in a wide variety of soils, climates, and situations and is highly perishable, which leads strawberries to have to be sold soon after they are harvested. There is a market for both frozen and fresh strawberries, with a current shift in production towards the more lucrative fresh strawberry market.
Health Benefits of the Strawberry
Demand for the strawberry has increased as a result of its numerous health benefits, which are a product of the crop’s low caloric content and significant amount of phenolics and micronutrients including vitamin C, folate, and vitamin K. As reviewed extensively by Sadia Afrin, these properties of the strawberry provide the crop with the ability to help combat the growth of cancerous cells, prevent anemia, aid in the prevention of obesity, and reduce the risk of high blood pressure.[3]
Issues of Pesticide Residues
Despite their natural health benefits, strawberries once again topped the Environmental Working Group’s 2018 list of the “dirty dozen” fruits and vegetables. The non-profit and non-partisan environmental organization randomly sampled 38,000 non-organically sourced strawberries and found that ⅓ of all samples contained ten or more different pesticides, with one sample containing residues of twenty-two different pesticides.[4] Pesticide use on strawberries is extremely high since the crop remains in the ground for one to two years and must be protected from pests. In 2014, although the USDA found that “overall pesticide chemical residues on strawberries were not at levels to be a safety concern to consumers, the scientists at EWG disagree and encourage consumers to buy organic as a way to protect themselves from the harmful effects of pesticides.[5] Pesticide application can also entail environmental justice issues, since strawberry harvesters are often Mexican immigrants and people living, going to school, and working near farms where pesticides are applied.
National Strawberry Production
The US produces 1.5 million tons of strawberries annually, which accounts for ⅓ of total world production. The strawberry is an extremely lucrative commodity and can yield more money per acre than any other US crop.[6] The dominant state producer of strawberries is California (61 percent of all US strawberries produced).[7] Just five counties, including four in California and one in Florida, account for over 75 percent of the nation’s strawberry acreage. California’s most significant regions of production overlap with the areas of the state that have been most affected by the drought, which has led to a 10 percent decline in total strawberry acreage in the state since the drought began. The country receiving the largest amount of US strawberry exports is Canada (83 percent of total exports) and the top importer of strawberries to the US is Mexico (82%). The closeness of the top exporting and importing countries to the US is a result of the crop being highly perishable.
Strawberry Farming – Small Scale Agriculture
As Miriam J. Wells highlights in her ethnographic account Strawberry Fields, specific commodity characteristics of the strawberry encourage small scale farming.[8] Timing and coordination of tasks for successful strawberry farming are important since times for planting, harvesting, and applying pesticides are extremely precise and crucial to obtaining a high crop yield. Strawberries are also in the ground longer than a lot of vegetable crops and must be picked by hand in a heavily supervised harvesting process since the crop is extremely fragile. As a result, fresh shippers like Driscoll generally stay out of the growing business. This gives farmers an edge, especially since fresh shippers are often short on fruit, and has led them to leverage their advantages through advisory boards including the California Strawberry Advisory Board (CSAB) and the Processing Strawberry Advisory Board (PSAB).[9] Finally, many strawberry growers on the West Coast are immigrants, often of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican descent who have worked their way up as families from farmers to growers over generations. The strawberry industry over the years has thus been a way for immigrant families to achieve success in the US through hard work and dedication to farming.
Centrality of Harvest Labor and the Reliance on a Migrant Peasantry
Properties of strawberries, including most importantly the fragility of the fresh commodity, have discouraged mechanized harvesting of the crop.[10] As a result, while technological advancements in the industry have increased productivity and decreased the need for non-harvest labor, the need for harvest labor has only increased as strawberry farms have become more productive. As a result of the centrality of labor to the strawberry harvest, labor has become the largest single component of farmer costs and can span from 50 to 70 percent of the total costs of business.
Unfortunately, as highlighted in the revealing ethnographic accounts Strawberry Fields and Eric Schlosser’s “In the Strawberry Fields,” work on the California strawberry farms is extremely hazardous and reliant on immigrants, both legal and illegal, who are often taken advantage of. Schlosser best describes the hardships of work by writing that “the average migrant worker is a twenty-eight-year-old male, born in Mexico, who earns about $5,000 a year for twenty-five weeks of farm work. His life expectancy is forty-nine years.”[11] Referred to as the fruit of the devil by workers, the harvest takes an enormous toll on workers’ backs and lungs, exposes them to thirteen hours of work daily in a hot dry climate, and leaves them susceptible to the long-term health risks of exposure to pesticides on the farm.[12] Labor camps that are extremely minimalist and provide a bed and two meals a day for $80 a week are also common and strongly resented by workers who often have no other choice for living arrangements.
Cost Cutting Strategies
There are numerous strategies that farmers adopt to decrease cost inputs of labor and thus expand profit margins. The simplest strategy is to pay workers, who are often illegal immigrants with little leverage, less than minimum wage. Additional tactics include paying on a piece-rate wage and a long history of sharecropping seeking that shifts the financial risks of strawberry farming off growers and onto migrant workers, who often do not understand the contracts they are signing and get heavily in debt.[13] While it is important to know that not all growers are doing this, by relying on poor migrants from Mexico, California growers have developed a wage structure that discourages American citizens from seeking farm work since wages are too low to provide for a family in the US. As a result, migrants have an enormous effect on the California and US economy and are integral to the success of the strawberry industry.
Protest and Change
Recently, strawberry workers have made headlines in the news by forming unions such as Familias Unidas por la Justicia in Washington and La Alianza in San Quintin Mexico.[14] These unions focus their efforts on revealing what life is like for harvesters and the hardships that they endure with the hopes of fostering changes within the strawberry industry through nonviolent action. The unions have sought to expose issues of wage theft, child labors, issues of migrant labor, lack of work breaks, and cramped housing conditions at Sakuma Brothers Farm in Washington and Berrymex in San Quintin. Familias Unidas por la Justicia organized the Boycott Driscoll campaign, which consisted of various protests on the West coast and led the union to reach a tentative deal in 2017 with Sakuma Brothers Farms to increase workers’ wages. President of Familias Unidas Ramon Torres called it a great deal for berry pickers and described the tentative deal as achieving some of the best wages farm workers have ever received in the state of Washington.[15] In contrast, not much has changed despite workers unionizing in San Quintin, where some workers are still making around six dollars a day for twelve hours work.[16] This could incite a shift in strawberry production from California to the other side of the Mexican border, since unions have so far had less influence in Mexico and thus the input costs of labor remain significantly lower in the country than in the United States.
Foot Notes
[1]Encyclopedia Britannica, sv. “Strawberry,” Chicago:Encyclopedia Britannica, 2016, accessed April 18, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/plant/strawberry.
[2]Ibid.
[3]Sadia Afrin, “Promising Health Effects of the Strawberry: A Focus on Clinical Studies,” J. Agric. Food Chem.64, no. 22 (2016): 4435–4449.
[4]Susan Scutti, “Strawberries again top 2018’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ Fruits and Veggies,” CNN, April 10, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/10/health/2018-dirty-dozen-fruits-and-veggies-ewg/index.html.
[5]Ibid.
[6]US Department of Agriculture, “US Strawberry Industry,” datasheet, updated through June 2013. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1381. The data describes the fresh and processed strawberry markets, including average yield, production, value, and trade and also contains state level production sheets.
[7]California Strawberry Commission (website), accessed April 18, 2018, http://www.calstrawberry.com/. This source provides extensive up to date statistics and information on California strawberry production.
[8]Miriam J Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 39.
[9]Ibid., 43.
[10]Ibid., 49.
[11]Eric Schlosser, “In the Strawberry Fields,” The Atlantic, November 1995, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/11/in-the-strawberry-fields/305754/.
[12]Ibid.
[13]Ibid.
[14]Esther Yu Hsi Lee, “Berry Farmworkers Toil 12 Hours a Day for $6. Now they are demanding a raise,” Thinkprogress,April 1, 2017. https://thinkprogress.org/berry-farmworkers-toil-12-hours-a-day-for-6-now-theyre-demanding-a-raise-ea4f5800caf8/.
[15]Jim Brunner, “Farmworker union reaches tentative contract deal with Sakuma berry farmers,” The Seattle Times, June 11, 2017. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/union-says-it-has-reached-contract-deal-with-sakuma-bros-berry-farm/.
[16]Lee, “Berry Farmworkers Toil 12 Hours a Day.”
Bibliography
Afrin, Sadia. “Promising Health Effects of the Strawberry: A Focus on Clinical Studies.” J. Agric. Food Chem. 64, no. 22 (2016): 4435-4449. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jafc.6b00857.
Brunner, Jim. “Farmworker union reaches tentative contract deal with Sajuma berry farmers.” The Seattle Times, June 11, 2017, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/union-says-it-has-reached-contract-deal-with-sakuma-bros-berry-farm/.
California Strawberry Commission (website). Accessed April 18, 2018. http://www.calstrawberry.com/.
Encyclopedia Britannica, sv. “Strawberry,” Chicago:Encyclopedia Britannica, 2016, last modified September 14, 2016, https://www.britannica.com/plant/strawberry.
Schlosser, Eric. “In the Strawberry Fields.” The Atlantic, November 1995. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/11/in-the-strawberry-fields/305754/.
Scutti, Susan. “Strawberries again top 2018’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ Fruits and Veggies.” CNN, April 10, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/10/health/2018-dirty-dozen-fruits-and-veggies-ewg/index.html.
US Department of Agriculture, “US Strawberry Industry,” datasheet, updated through June 2013. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1381.
Wells, Miriam J. Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Yu Hsi Lee, Esther. “Berry Farmworkers Toil 12 Hours a Day for $6. Now they are demanding a raise.” Thinkprogress, April 1, 2017. https://thinkprogress.org/berry-farmworkers-toil-12-hours-a-day-for-6-now-theyre-demanding-a-raise-ea4f5800caf8/.