Strawberry Fields Forever
By Cecelia Fatta
Hands stained crimson, I quickly climbed into my car, the backs of my legs burning as they touched the black seats. More red stains seeped into the floor mats, no doubt trailed in with my hiking boots. I slammed the door and pressed the brake until I heard the engine roar to life. I rooted around the glove compartment until success! I yanked out a wet wipe and frantically scrubbed my hands. Some sticky redness came off, but much remained around my fingernails.
If this sounds like a crime scene, I would agree. However, this was simply my daily summer routine working on a berry farm in southeastern Ohio. With a season lasting from Mother’s Day until around Father’s Day, strawberries were just coming into season when I got home from Columbia last May. Every morning, I would drive about half an hour to Stacy Family Farm through winding West Virginia roads. The farm is known for their strawberries, but I helped with other crops, including blueberries, raspberries, and tomatoes.
Many people probably think farming is antiquated, imagining planting seeds one by one in a field, but it is so technologically advanced. For example, one of my main tasks was picking strawberries. You might imagine me hunched over in a field, but on the contrary, it was quite a luxurious experience. The farm has strawberry “pickers,” solar-powered machines that roll between rows. You lay down on your stomach, and you reach down onto either side of a row to pick berries. A convenient button near your feet allows you to maneuver the picker forward and backward. The machines even had roofs to shade the workers from the sun. Operating a picker was a nice, quiet break from the more talkative cashier role, where we handled payment. Many customers wanted to know how we grow our berries and whether we use pesticides or GMOs. I was always happy to explain that the farm doesn’t use pesticides and that genetically-modified strawberries don’t yet exist. Also, GMOs have been revolutionary in how the world is fed, which many people overlook. GMOs can increase yields, decrease pesticide use, and increase shelf life, all of which can help with world hunger.
During strawberry season, a team of workers is needed to keep up with the cash registers, wash strawberry buckets, drive customers around, and the most time-consuming job of all - pick berries. Most customers love picking their own berries, but some can’t or don’t have the time. We calculated that, on average, each employee picked about seventy pounds of strawberries per hour during peak season! Peak season only lasts a few weeks, though, until hotter weather in June quickly demolishes the fragile berries that are left in the fields. The humid summer heat sapped my energy every day, and when I returned home in the evening, I usually ended up falling asleep while attempting to watch a movie with my parents.
Immediately after strawberries end, blueberries start coming into season. I never liked blueberries until I had the ones from this farm. Instead of the miniscule, slightly bitter blueberries you might find in a grocery store, these were flavorful and sweet, some reaching the size of quarters! To prepare for blueberry season, we dragged dozens of fifty-pound nets up the blueberry hill. If you don’t cover blueberry bushes with nets, birds will eat them all. Even with the nets, birds manage to sneak under, so freeing birds from the nets was a daily occurrence.
Raspberry and tomato season also starts in June. We had red, black, and gold raspberries - a sight you would probably never see in a New York City grocery store. We “trained” the raspberries to grow up wires, instead of along the ground, and I quickly learned the unforgiving nature of their thorns. We sold many of our tomatoes to nearby restaurants and to auctions, as the high tunnel greenhouse we grew them in produced far too many to sell solely on the farm.
I want to work in sustainable agriculture or food science in the future, so working on a strawberry farm was perfect for me. Since my family had been coming to this farm to pick strawberries since I was very young, it was already close to my heart. Something about having a role in growing your food changes how you see it. Instead of a random box of blueberries from the grocery store, you see the labor of protecting them from birds and pulling endless weeds that attempt to choke their bushes. Even if it’s only for the summer, I am excited to trade New York’s endless rows of buildings for endless rows of berries.
Cecelia Fatta is a sophomore in Columbia College majoring in Neuroscience and Behavior. Hailing from West Virginia (not Virginia), she loves baking, jump rope, and traveling. She hopes to pursue a career in food science or sustainable agriculture.
