Dole Strawberry Fields

On Wednesday, June 15^th, as we arrived at the Dole strawberry fields, we were greeted with a fabulous spread of chocolate covered fruits and champagne.  The following is information that I learned on this tour.

One million flats were shipped from the Salinas Valley yesterday (Tuesday), an exceptional harvest.  So for the next 6 to 8 weeks, the strawberries will e as inexpensive as ever in our markets.

This strawberry field is literally on the Monterey Bay ocean coast.  They are here because the climate is perfect.  In the summer, the Alaskan current follows a jet stream to here which also allows a thick fog over the land for an hour each morning and producing an optimum temperature of 51 to 53 degrees.  According to Vinny Lopes, head strawberry dude, “God meant strawberries to be grown here.  It’s a dominate berry climate”.

For 14 to 16 months the strawberries will tie up this land and then the crops will be rotated.  In August or September, Dole will build up new beds on new blocks of land.  They build the beds up to keep the water off the berries which also keeps nutrients in the berries.  When planting starts, they plant each singular root by hand, one by one.  90 million plants will be planted in a 7 to 8 week period.

By December and January, the plants are starting to bud, but growers will retard the process 2 times by pulling off the flowers and then later pulling off the runners.  This causes the strawberry plant to divide and then one plant now becomes 4 to 6 plants.

April 1^st, the picking begins and will last until late October or early November.  It’s a very laborious job, bent over the strawberries all day as they hand pick each perfect strawberry.

Dole has “Scouts” in the fields that do visual inspection of leaf samples.  Then back at the lab the leaves are juiced for mineral evaluations.  Another bag of leaves is evaluated for insects.  Dole even has a vacuum in the field to suck up insects.  This is new within the past 5 years.  They even use a GPS to identify the exact location of increased insects.\\The pickers are filling clam shell packages as they pick. Then the trays are boxed and put onto a pallet right there in the field.  Quality control personnel are in the field to weigh packages and visually inspect each package.  It’s also mandatory the the strawberry “Cut to Cold” time is less that 4 hours.

Dole has 45 years of agricultural progressive research.  Dole has union employees with full benefits, hourly pay plus incentives.  They have high retention programs for employees because we all understand the importance of having consistent experience with our employees.

As we left, we were provided a lunch pack for our hour drive to the Dole Salad Packing Facility.  The fields and the information we learned today was SO VERY interesting!  And the Dole employees were SO very gracious!

Michele Kauffman

Harter House and World Flavors