The Price You Pay

We sell our organic strawberries at our farm stand and in farmer’s markets for what I consider a reasonable price, but we occasionally have people who ask why they are so expensive relative to the $.99 pints they can find in their grocery store.

I could tell them that they usually get what they pay for—in my opinion those $.99 berries are worth just about that. Large scale growers choose varieties that are hard enough to withstand shipping long distances and pick them when they are only half ripe. Additionally, the high analysis synthetic fertilizers they use result in higher yields but sacrifice flavor even further.

I could also tell them that the person or company that grew those $.99 berries is probably at that time losing money on them. Due to the increased productivity of new varieties and the fact that the acreage of berries grown in coastal California increases each year, there is invariably a tremendous glut of berries in May and June driving prices downward. In a typical year the wholesale prices for conventionally grown berries will bottom out below $5.00 a case (12 pint baskets). That probably just about covers the cost of the box and the labor to fill it. It doesn’t come close to covering the extremely high costs of production associated with strawberries in this area.

My favorite answer, however, is to tell them that they pay for those $.99 berries one way or another. When I was going to school at the University of California at Santa Cruz, those in the Agroecology department liked to use the phrase “sustainable farmers internalize the externalities.” That organic farmers absorb the costs that conventional growers pass along to society in one way or another is a concept that I understood in an abstract way at the time. But I never really fully understood it until I had spent some years living and farming here in the Watsonville area.

Our farm is located along Harkins Slough, the largest and least disturbed of the five “fingers” of the Watsonville slough system, a series of shallow freshwater estuaries. “Least disturbed” is a relative term, for although the slough hosts an impressive array of birds and mammals around its periphery, the water quality has been severely degraded. Sedimentation, over-nutrification and pesticide contamination from surrounding farming operations are primarily to blame.

In the spring several years ago I took a day off and paddled the canoe eastward to the head of our slough with our two daughters. When we couldn’t paddle any further we beached the canoe and began to explore an abandoned farmstead on a parcel that the Federal Fish and Wildlife service had recently purchased. The driveway to the farmstead is located at the base of a bluff on top of which sits a large conventional strawberry field with highly erosive sandy soils. The wintertime run-off from this field is channeled into a deeply eroded gully in the bluff, through a culvert beneath the driveway, and into the slough. When I first came upon the fan shaped alluvial deposit of sediment on the slough side of the culvert I was astounded that such a huge amount of material could come off of a single field. Measuring at least three feet thick in the middle by over 100 feet wide it has to contain many hundreds of tons of silt and sand. And what came along with it in the way of highly soluble synthetic fertilizers one can only guess.

Unfortunately this is just one of many examples of poor land stewardship in the strawberry fields around us and in North Monterey County. If you were to approach the growers responsible many would undoubtedly tell you (with some truth) that taking the measures to prevent such degradation are too expensive when they are operating with such thin margins.

We too have steep erosive sandy slopes on our farm and we go to great length to ensure that that kind of failure doesn’t occur. The steepest slopes we take out of production entirely during the winter, watering up a stabilizing cover crop as early as September. We plant grasses on all of our roadways and spread straw on the steepest sections. Any run-off that does occur during winter is channeled into a riparian buffer-strip that we planted the year after we bought this farm. The willows, cottonwoods, box elders, and other trees together with low growing sedges slow down any run-off to the point that nearly all sediment drops out and any water leaving our farm is clear.

I have always dreamed of having a farm with a fine swimming hole that one could dive into after work on a hot afternoon.  Yet, although there are lots of creeks, sloughs, and even a river here in the Pajaro Valley, the water quality is mostly so poor that one wouldn’t think of swimming in them—which seems like a real shame to me.

There are reasons for hope, however. The 300 acre farm that adjoins us to the east and south was recently purchased by The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County and they are taking steps to make sure that property is managed more responsibly. Also, seven parcels within Harkins Slough itself have been transferred to the State Fish and Game department, and the aforementioned sizable parcel on the opposite bank was purchased by the Federal Fish and Wildlife service. All of these groups and agencies are working together to help improve the water quality within the slough. If they are successful, and if more growers work to internalize the externalities, maybe going for a swim won’t be so unthinkable after all.

(Revised from an article originally printed in 2006)