Any small scale (10 acres) strawberry farmers on here?

Has anybody tried small scale (10 acres) of strawberry farming? I know where a piece of land could be purchased at below market value. I know you would have to either buy or rent a plant setter. Am not sure herbicides are cleared for strawberries. Government approval is very expensive and the market is relatively small. Finding labor to pick berries would be another nightmare. Am not sure if you could get Hispanic labor for such a small acreage, the job would only last a couple of weeks. U-pick would be the easy way out but your clients would damage green berries.
I'm just kicking the idea around, would appreciate any input if anybody else has tried it.
Thanks.

Most of the strawberry growers in my area are Pick Your Own operations,some also pick the for sale but they are more expensive.

See if Eldon (WA) responses. He ran a smaller truck farming type of operation. He would have some idea of the issues your facing.

The things I see you need to know are:
1) Demand for strawberries in your area.
2) Local production practices that work in your area.
3) Capitol investment needed for equipment and seeding.
4) The actual type of operation your going to try to do. As that will dramatically effect your labor requirements.
5) Water requirements in your area. I personally know two producers and they both have irrigation setups. Needed for frost issues as well as summer watering.

So even on a smaller scale you will need to gain knowledge so you can make an informed decision.

A guy down the road from me, had one he ran for a few years. He shut it down last year. He had a pick-your-own type operation. He said that people would bring their family in and they would wander the rows and eat till they got their fill then come up to pay out and have a quart of strawberries to pay for.

He even tried posting signs about no eating the strawberries while you pick. That did not slow them down.

I think 10 acres is hardly small scale. I have a farm stand and go to farm markets all summer, and I have only planted up to 1/3 acre at a time. An acre of plasticulture berries has about 14,000 plants and should produce about 10,000 quarts or more of strawberries, 75% of them in about a one week period. So it is a real problem getting them picked and marketed. I usually have one good week at the market, but not near enough berries by the next market Friday. If I wanted to run a u-pick, I would probably start with about 1 acre. Also, if it rains a lot, you will lose a lot of fruit. I am going to have to learn how to spray with fungicides, although I had hoped to not need them. But every year I lose about half the crop to rotted or spotted berries. Yes, they are easy to sell and people love them, but making money on them is a little tricky. There are other, less fragile and perishable produce crops that can be grown with good results, although every crop has its challenges. I plant about 10 acres of sweetcorn.

When I grew up we did strawberries. Usually 3 acre rotations for three years give or take. In the 70's we had pickers - even supplied berries for Queen Elizabeth when she made a visit to Vancouver... I was probably 4 or 5 then so don't really remember but I recall mom and dad complaint about the fruit pickers back then too.
In the 90's we still had some but it was strictly U-Pick. In the right market you can do OK with that especially if you go no spray or Organic if you really think you can work hard.

Basic equipment... rotivator with strawberry kit ... which basically means you take out the middle tines and they have sweeps or slats to bolt in place stopping the dirt from covering the plants.
Spring tooth cultivator for keeping weeds out of rows.
Brush cutter to knock the plants back at the end of the season.
Sprayer if you choose to go that way... there are registered herbicides, insecticides and fungicides.
Irrigation equipment ... we used hand lines, I guess a gun would work for summer ... buds and growth for the following year.
Hoes and a bunch of teenagers to clean the rows ... that was me.
Transplanter, we had a two row, they are avalible used if you look around. Hand planting works if it's laid out right but a lot of work.
Of course regular tillage is handy, subsoiler, plow, discs, packer and a few tractors are nice to have.
We also had a longer shank cultivator with a fertilizer side dresser on it.

Now days they have daynutral varieties ( everbearing) so you can get more of a season than 3 weeks. Plastic mulch is used as is drip tape for irrigation.

And just as a side note ... Deer love strawberries. So plan on fencing if there are deer around.

It's actually not that hard, and they do taste great!
Check with your local extension agent or state agrologist. Up here in BC we have a Provincial Berry Guide which gives advise etc on how to grow most berry crops.

God luck. Grant

Yeah ! another B.C. boy heard from. Wanna do a side talk about our current political situation ?
e-mail open.

Interesting that you ask because tonight is the strawberry moon

While I have no direct connection if you google either "strawberry festival" or "strawberry capital of the world" you will most likely come up with my home town. Ten years ago we had over 200 growers in my parish (county to you) but that is down to about 40 growers planting 350 acres today. LSU has a bunch of stuff online that you can read but do not know if any of it will apply to as you gave us no idea of where you are located.

1) Do you have a market. 10 acres is a LOT of strawberries to unload everyday. I do not think you realize how many berries can be produced on 1 acre. At 8000 to 18000 plants per acre depending on row configuration you are talking a lot of plants.
2) Strawberries (at least around here) are grown on black plastic rows with drip irrigation and soil fumigation. This involves machinery to lay down and pick up the plastic every year.
3) Do you plan on growing the plants year round or are you planning to buy new plants each year. Buying new plants as plugs rather than bare root works best for us.
4) Removable row covers are mandatory for us as our plants are grown threw the winter.
5) Growing berries is very labor intensive. With several growers in the area they are able to bring in bus loads of migrants and split them up between the farms.
6) Some have tried pick your own but they never seem to last. Time you figure crop loss from inexperienced pickers, parking area, hours put in to be open when people can come, liability, proximity to populated areas, loss of crop that ripens during weekday when traffic is low, you are better off hiring help.
7) Berries need to be kept cool to shipping. All the growers around here have large coolers to store picked berries.

I could go on but I think you get the idea.

Politics are always a bit crazy on the left coast ... keeps life interesting. Actually there are a lot of countries surrounding us with similar political uncertainty ... look at the UK.
While I do find politics very interesting... I don't have time to dwell on things of this nature. I'm just trying to run my farm / business the best I can and hopefully spend some time with wife and young kids at the end of the day.

I like coming here to learn new thing and think of some old ones.... might even consider growing an acre or two of strawberries again.
For now I'm just enjoying a cold one from the "Left Of The Divide" cheers!

My dad and grandfather did strawberries from the 40's up to 1962. They never had more than 1 acre at a time, they had 3 acres total. Back then, with bare root plants, you got very little the first year, a good second year, and then a small 3rd year, then you started over. It was a lot of hard, stoop labor. They sold well, made decent money, but it sure wasn't easy money!

Several of the local Amish grow strawberries. The largest has about 2 acres. They get TONS off of it. One of our neighbors (Amish) has three rows, about 40 feet long, and 3 feet wide. They pick an average of 20 gallons a day. Take that times the 20 families that are growing them, and there are enough to go around and then some. The largest guy took over 100 gallons to the local produce auction last week (in Jamesport, MO).

It is interesting how regional agriculture is. I grow strawberries small-scale for my area--less than a 1/10 acre. Ten acres of strawberries around here is big. I don't make a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it helps pay some of the bills.

And it's interesting how agriculture changes over time. Before large-scale national shipping, my region did grow a lot of strawberries--acres and acres and acres. The old timers talk about loading them on trains and sending them to Philadelphia.

But that era is long gone, and any strawberries grown here now are sold at farm stands or to restaurants so acreage is small.

Where are you at? It would be fun to visit the places that grow the strawberries that get shipped over the whole country. (Even though I hope my customers decide mine taste better so they keep coming to me.)

I have had several people ask me if we were going to do this. decided against it. We have too many deer, they would destroy the plot before we got the 1st berry.

When my wife was a little girl, she went to visit at her uncle's place where he had a large strawberry plot. She and her cousins spent most of their time picking strawberries. Then he uncle learned that there was no local market for the strawberries. The kids helped dump all the strawberries that they had picked into the local river; kids didn't question doing that, just did what the uncle told them to do.

Thanks folks I'm just testing the waters.

Used to goto a blueberry farm that was pick your own. They would weigh you going in and out LOL

When I was a kid we had about 20 acres and all done by hand. No chemicals but fertilizer used. Getting pickers was no problem. We paid 5 cents per qt for uncapped and 10cents per qt for capped in field. We did not have a deer problem, never saw one in fact. We have a local strawberry festival every year for the last 80 years-big deal here. The few growers now have 5-10 acres and sell to the public only but not u pick.