Planning for a long season

I have the belief that strawberry seasons that start early end up easier to manage and  probably more profitable. To make up for two lost weeks at the start of the season means either trying to sell more fruit in October or coping with larger peaks of production in the summer.

For main crop tunnel production Elsanta we are of course able to give ourselves an advantage by further advancing production through fleecing, double skinning and earlier sheeting dates. The next big gains will either be through the use of earlier varieties or bed or tunnel plastics.

The big problem area for the industry is to try and have our everbearer season running in natural succession to main crop Elsanta and have this crop without a huge peak and finishing too early. There is no quick fix for a grower that will gaurantee not to show a trough of production between main crop Elsanta and everbearer; we still rely heavily on 60 day Elsanta.

In the future we hope to have everbearers of sufficient quality that we can crop and market from late May until October. On an experimental basis we are close to achieving this, but commercially the system fails because we meet a huge volume of less desirable varieties retailing at low prices. So for now we need to focus on how we spread the everbearer season more uniformly from July to October.

All the techniques used have a small influence on shifting production curves that are scarcely noticed by individual growers. But, by the industry adopting these techniques we can collectively avoid some of the stresses caused by oversupply as witnessed during
2004.

- Having a spread of varieties throughout the industry is the biggest help; all the varieties have quite distinct cropping patterns.

- While Everest remains the predominant variety, varying the planting date has a small effect on start dates but individually not a large difference across the whole industry.

- There is a similar effect from fleecing after planting.

- Tunnel management can have a big effect; high early temperatures seem to make the crop more peaked and can have the effect of foreshortening the cropping season. The search is on to have tunnel plastics that have a more moderate effect on temperatures when we are not able to vent tunnels due to rain. The choice of bed mulch is perhaps a little limited and probably there are some opportunities to explore advantages some other materials may provide.

- Experimentally we can munipulate planting materials to have a major effect on cropping pattern and in particular moving the peaks of production; the search is on commercialise this.

For our UK everbearer that can peak so heavily and rather unpredictably our last resort is a self imposed market intervention system. We either pick and clear some of the peak crop and dump or pick and sell at prices that may well be below our costs of production and harvest. Neither system is particularly attractive commercially, therefore anything we can do with crop manipulation is probably a good investment.

Spring 2005