If the hydroponics trend continues, strawberries could be available locally everywhere. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)
It’s the middle of winter and you’re craving some fresh,
juicy strawberries. Go to your local grocery store and
you’ll find lots of packaged strawberries shipped from the
west coast or down south. For locally grown strawberries,
you have to wait till June if you live in the Midwest. But
that’s starting to change. Jennifer Guerra has the story:
Transcript
It’s the middle of winter and you’re craving some fresh,
juicy strawberries. Go to your local grocery store and
you’ll find lots of packaged strawberries shipped from the
west coast or down south. For locally grown strawberries,
you have to wait till June if you live in the Midwest. But
that’s starting to change. Jennifer Guerra has the story:
I like strawberries. A lot. There’s strawberry rhubarb pie
for starters, strawberry and spinach salad, strawberry
shortcake. But I’ve been on this kick lately of trying to
buy only locally-grown produce, which is admittedly hard to do when you
live in the Midwest, especially with strawberries. Most of
the year, they’re shipped in from Florida and California,
but there is one place in Michigan were you can still pick
strawberries as late as October.
(Guerra:) “The redder the better…that’s too green”
It’s snowing out. I’ve got on the winter coat, the hat, the gloves,
and I’m picking strawberries with Kelly Bowerman.
(Guerra:) “So, which one is this?”
(Bowerman:) “This is a tribute. We have aroma, diamante, and
tribute. Aroma is a nice big berry, diamante’s even a bigger berry,
but it just don’t turn red, it’s oranged-colored, and tribute is smaller with a lot more
flavor.”
(Guerra:) “Alright, let’s get all three. Let’s get a
variety.”
Bowerman calls his strawberries three finger berries, which
he says are roughly the same size as the ones shipped in
from California
(Bowerman and Guerra try strawberries)
And frankly, the strawberries better taste
good, seeing as how Bowerman spent 60,000 dollars on them.
Well, not on the actual berries themselves, but on the
hydroponics system he uses to grow the berries. With
hydroponics, he still grows his strawberries outside, but
instead of planting them in the ground, the runners sit in
pots above the ground in a solution of warm water and
minerals. And since there’s no soil, the strawberries can
grow from June to October without the roots freezing over at
the first sign of cold weather. Still, there’s only so much
a hydroponics system can do on its own:
“He’s gonna find out that people want strawberries at
Christmastime, and so the next step will be to put a
greenhouse over that system and then we have 12 months.”
Merle Jensen is a professor of plant science at the
University of Arizona and he knows his hydroponics. He
knows growers all across the country who’ve started moving
their hydroponics systems inside greenhouses so they can
artificially light the crops. That way, they can produce
year round. But wait, there’s more:
“All of our leafy vegetables – high value fruits like
strawberries – will all be under cover in the next 5 years.
I’m sure of that. It’s a rapid expansion, not only in the
United States, but we see it in Canada, Mexico. So, this is the wave
of the future.”
A future that Jensen swears will taste delicious:
“You know what? I can say that because we can control the
nutrition, the salinity within the root system such that we can
program that product to have more acid and more sugars and better
flavor, and we can do that through hydroponics at will. And local growing is
becoming bigger and bigger all the time. It’s just got an
image of being better.”
Of course in the Midwest, “local” is still pretty relative.
Our Michigan farmer, Kelly Bowerman, says he gets people
from up to 50 miles away to pick his strawberries:
“One guy bought $28 worth of strawberries, and he said that ain’t
no big deal cause it cost me $40 worth of gas to
get here and back.”
And he’ll have to continue putting in that kind of travel
time if he wants to eat locally grown strawberries in the
middle of winter. Unless of course Jensen’s right and
hydroponic greenhouse systems really are the wave of the
future. If so, it might not be too long before Bowerman’s
strawberries show up year round at your supermarket.
Oh, and by the way, I liked the tribute strawberries the
best. They were my favorite.
For the Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.