By Clint Thompson
Persistent rainfall this spring put a damper on strawberry production in North Carolina (N.C.). It impacted the quality of the fruit and some patrons willing to come out to U-pick farms throughout the state, according to Austin Wrenn, president of the North Carolina Strawberry Association.
“The worst was for our pick-your-own growers that were mostly direct to market or direct to consumer. What happened was, I think we were having 10 out of 12 weekends this spring, we had rain at some point during that weekend. That really put a damper on customers coming out to U-pick farms to pick,” Wrenn said. “Customers don’t really like walking through soaking wet fields. We lost a lot of berries to botrytis and some anthracnose that were results of the rains. We had some issues there, nothing major, but more of just that it was raining when customers would come out to those farms.
“(Despite that) we had really good customer support this year. Even during the week, we had a lot of customers come out. Most of our growers were picked out most weeks. It was great customer support, just the berry quality wasn’t quite there because of some of the rains.”
How Significant of a Loss?
North Carolina producers lost a lot of their peak season crop due to the excessive rains. Wrenn estimated that some producers lost between 30% and 40% on some of the more vulnerable varieties due to the wet weather.
“We were really hoping to make that up at the end of the season, and it looked like we had a good potential to. There are still growers that are picking pretty well, but we do see that demand is falling down. That’s normal, and we kind of expect that. Usually at the end of May, demand for strawberries really falls off when blueberries start coming in and other summer crops, we do see that demand usually start declining,” Wrenn added.