Strawberry crop hit hard by rain in Modesto, Merced

Heavy rain more than a week ago resulted in a strawberry shortage throughout the state.

Strawberries tolerate some moisture from light spring rains but soakings such as that from the storms the weekend of April 9 rotted nearly all of the strawberries that were ripe for the picking. The Modesto area got more than 2 inches of rain.

“Even green strawberries were affected by that rain,” said John Bos, owner of Dutch Hollow Farms on Oakdale Road. “The field was flowering beautifully and that rain came in and you just see green strawberries that have turned brown. It affected not only that crop, but the crop that was going to ripen three weeks from then.”

Bos suspects the shortage to last another three weeks, possibly longer depending on rain from a storm forecast Friday.

After a storm, it takes a few days for mold to show up, and it was a few more days before local stands ran out of good strawberries.

Bee Yang, owner of Monte Vista Strawberries in Turlock, has been out of strawberries since Saturday.

He said in the 24 years his family has been in the business, he has never seen rot this extensive.

His 6 acres produce 37,000 pounds of strawberries during a three-day period. A contractor for Dole Food Co., Yang said he salvaged half of them to be juiced, but the rest were spoiled.

“Sugar and rain don’t mix,” said Modesto farmer Bill Loretelli.

He said he lost about 80 percent of his 1.5-acre crop and stopped selling strawberries at his fruit stand on Claratina Avenue on Friday. By Monday, the demand was so great he sold some he “was not too proud of, that were not quite ripe.”

The rains only impacted the ripe berries at Loretelli Farms, but brown rot developed in green strawberries at many farms and some even lost plants.

Yang’s Farm and Produce Stand in Merced had to dig up some of the plants, according to employee Leng Vang.

He said some strawberries were salvaged here and there but the stand lost about 95 percent of the 2-acre patch, while many farmers in the area lost everything. He said some stands in the area closed down altogether.

“The average farm is probably losing $500 a day in sales right now,” Bos said.

That loss is trickling down to the pickers. The farmer still has to pay them to clear the fields of the rotten berries, but pickers earn only about $10 an hour rather than the higher per-bucket rate when the fruit is edible.

Right now, “it is taking the average picker a half-hour to make a bucket they usually fill in 5 to 10 minutes,” Bos said. “If they fill 10 buckets an hour they get $30 an hour, but if they are only picking five buckets it’s a whole other story.”

The cost to consumers at the stands locally, however, hasn’t increased.

“It would instantaneously turn away customers,” Bos said.

All the farmers acknowledge that the state as a whole needs water, but hope the storm predicted for Friday isn’t another soaker. If the prediction holds, it should bring only about one-tenth-inch to a quarter-inch of rain.

This story was originally published April 19, 2016 at 6:17 PM with the headline "Strawberry crop hit hard by rain in Modesto, Merced."