When we first started farming we rented an old craftsman house in downtown Watsonville and I made the daily five mile commute to the field we were leasing on the outskirts of La Selva Beach. My route passed right by a large conventional field being managed by a company that was bought out by Dole Foods. Passing by two or more times a day, I learned a lot about their practices. Specifically, I learned that they sprayed—a lot. One of the basic tenets of IPM (Integrated Pest Management) is to scout your field assiduously and apply pesticides only when and where they are really needed.
For conventional growers this approach is considered a major upgrade on the practice of spraying on a “schedule”—applying pesticides and fungicides on a regular “scheduled” basis to the entire field in anticipation of the pests and diseases arrival, not based on what you are seeing in the field. The managers of the field I used to pass by definitely sprayed on a schedule. On a weekly basis I would see the spray tractors hovering in the wings, waiting for the picking crews to finish so they could descend upon the field. Since many of the materials they were using had mandated re-entry intervals of several days before the fruit could be harvested or a crew could re-enter the field, they would always spray right after a field was picked.
So it came as no surprise when a new report from the Environmental Working Group listed conventionally grown strawberries at the top of the dirty dozen crops for pesticide residues. EWG analyzed data from USDA samples of produce from 2009 and 2014. The 2014 strawberry tests found 98 percent with detectable residues, 40 percent had residues of 10 or more pesticides, and the worst sample had traces of 17 different pesticides. Altogether 60 different pesticides were found on the berries. Tasty!
On a related strawberry issue, we’ve written before about the unavailability of organic starter stock (called crowns) for growing organic strawberries. To briefly recap the issue, most strawberry varieties are propagated via runners that are trimmed off of “mother” plants and planted at high-elevation nurseries, where they accumulate more “chill” hours so they will grow more vigorously when replanted in the low elevation, coastal production areas. The problem is that the only organic nursery closed up several years ago due to lack of customers! The organic regulations require using organic crowns “except when unavailable,” and without that “loophole” we wouldn’t be able to grow organic strawberries at all (and given the level of pesticide residues on the conventional ones, organically grown berries are a vast improvement). That rule is meant to help transition the market until the industry grows large enough that the organic crowns have a ready market and nurseries step in to fill a ready niche. But when Prather nursery stepped up and grew organic crowns in 2007 through 2009, the industry dropped the ball. The small growers like us bought our plants there, but the big growers didn’t buy them. Disgusted, Prather called it quits and left us without a source for organic crowns.
We’ve been exploring solutions for the past several years, including planting a trial of organic plug plants last year. But the big breakthrough came late last year when Driscolls announced that for their organic production, they plan to transition their planting stock to 100 percent organic over the next 5 years. This was great news, but because Driscolls has their own nurseries and their own proprietary varieties, it means that those of us who grow “public” varieties would be left out in the cold. To help address this problem, together with other growers and organic advocates, we helped to form a group called The Organic Strawberry Alliance. One of the first things we did was to contact James Rickert, who ran the organic start program at Prather Ranch, to see if he was interested in starting up production again. To our delight, he agreed and has formed a new company called Innovative Organic Nursery which will have plants available on a limited basis this fall. We have pre-ordered all of our plants from him.
As a group, one of our priorities is to start a public awareness campaign with a label such as “Organic from Start to Finish.” Our hope is that by creating a demand on the part of the public and wholesale buyers, we can entice other, larger, growers to come along voluntarily. As the demand grows, more nurseries should step in to fill the niche, and then no grower will be able to claim that they used conventional crowns because organic ones were “unavailable.”
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