By Clint Thompson
Like most years, weather played a significant impact on Alabama’s strawberry production – for better and for worse – especially in the central part of the state where David Lawrence serves as regional Extension agent.
He said a cold snap slowed production around the middle to the end of April. Saturated conditions in May led to berries getting beat up. Fruit softened, leading to much of the crop being left in the field.
“I felt like it was a fairly decent year. Guys would have said it would have been a good year if we could have got out in the field and harvested everything that was there; that last half of May or so,” Lawrence said.
On the bright side, farmers who sourced their plants out west largely avoided neopestalotiopsis (Neo), a disease that threatened a substantial amount of strawberries throughout the Southeast this year.
“Most of my guys were able to get plants out of California. We’ll just say the western half of the United States, they were able to get plants from out there. So far, we haven’t seen any Neo in those plants,” Lawrence said.
“We had a really warm November, so those plants got established pretty good. We had a decent crop, aside from all the rain that we had. I felt like we had a pretty decent crop on the strawberries to start out with. We had a little bit lull in production for a while, and that was just across the whole area.”