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CUESA visited Swanton Berry Farm as part of the Growing Inspiration Farm Tour on August 21, 2011. Photos by Barry Jan and CUESA.
Swanton Berry Farm has several pieces of land; our first stop was their farm stand, located 12 miles north of Santa Cruz on Highway 1. This land has limited water, so they only grow two acres of strawberries, pumpkins, and a small garden.
This is the farm stand, where you can buy jams, pastries, soup, and more. Our group enjoyed strawberry shortcake and a creamy soup made from cauliflower grown on the farm (more about the cauliflower later).
Hooray for charming, hand-painted signs, and for encouraging pedal power!
Jim Cochran is Swanton's founder. He's a pioneer in his field--not only was Swanton the first certified organic strawberry farm in California, but it was also the first organic farm to sign a contract with the United Farm Workers, and the first farm in the US to offer an employee stock ownership program.
Swanton keeps their workers' well-being in mind. For example: while standard strawberry beds are 4-6" tall, Swanton's are 24". This is partially for better drainage, but mainly because it preserves people's backs.
The black plastic mulch serves five purposes:
- It keeps weeds under control (and thus saves labor).
- It reduces bugs and pathogens.
- It keeps the soil moist.
- It absorbs heat from the sun and helps warm the roots, which means faster growth.
- It stops erosion. (The strawberry industry loses $2.8 billion worth of soil each year, according to our tour guide.)
This photo shows Swanton's Coastways Ranch U-pick. It's right by the ocean, about eight miles north of the farm stand.
This is Barrett Boaen (a.k.a. Bear), who was our tour guide. Bear knows a whole heck of a lot about berries, sustainability, and agriculture in general. He's holding containers we later used to pick blackberries.
We picked our own berries and learned a few things.
For example, did you know that strawberries are not a fruit? Botanically, they are considered a false fruit, with seeds on the outside.
If you were to plant strawberry seeds, you'd only get a 2% germination rate. For this reason, strawberries are bred vegetatively. Clones of the mother plant are produced by rooting the stolons (long running stems that grow from each plant). Swanton's strawberry starts come from a nursery east of Shasta.
Picking the berries was fun, and enjoying them was easy. They were delicious!
Gophers are a pest on any farm, but Swanton's biggest concern is Verticilium, a fungus that stays dormant in the soil for 25 years. Most strawberry growers get rid of it by fumigating the soil with methyl bromide (developed during WW2 as a chemical weapon--pretty toxic stuff) or methyl iodide (used to induce cancer in lab experiments). These chemicals render the field devoid of all life--no fungus, no ants, no worms, no gophers, no seeds, no nothing. More info on these chemicals and how to stop their use is available from the Safe Strawberry Campaign.
This plant--broccoli--is one of Swanton's secrets for producing strawberries organically, without toxic soil fumigation. All the Brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, etc.) contain a natural substance that reduces soil pathogens, and Swanton uses them as part of the crop rotation. After harvesting the broccoli heads, they incorporate the rest of the plant back into the soil, and it reduces the Verticillium enough that berries can then be planted.
They were also growing cauliflower. This baby was smaller than a golf ball.
The farm uses a blocking system of crop rotation, in which they plant a new block each week. This keeps the harvests coming. Pictured here are broccoli and mustard. We were impressed to learn that the mustard seeds are sold and pressed into oil for biofuel.
This field has several varieties of cane berries, including blackberries, olallieberries, and raspberries. (These are either tayberries or olallieberries, but, while the distinction was easy for Bear to see, such subtleties eluded us.)
Both tayberries and olallieberries are blackberry-raspberry hybrids, but tayberries are half loganberry (which is a blackberry-raspberry cross) and half black raspberry, whereas olallies are a cross between a loganberry and a youngberry, which is a dewberry-raspberry hybrid. Got it?
We appreciated that the good folks at Swanton were thoughtful enough to plant thornless blackberry varieties.
We learned that profitability can be challenging with cane berries. There's only about a six week window of harvest each year, but they're in the ground for 10 years (and it takes a few years for them to start producing). The farm has to make all its money during that six-week period.
For that reason, they make jam five days a week during harvest time. The jam business is also a perfect way to use strawberries that didn't sell at the market. They have some of the best strawberry jam we've tasted.
They also grow kiwis. These weren't ready to harvest yet. We learned that the kiwi was previously called "sun peach" and "Chinese gooseberry," but sales didn't take off until they got their current name.
Kiwis ripen off the vine. They are harvested hard and only ripen after going through a "cold event" (which means sitting in the refrigerator for two weeks) and finally ripening on the counter.
CUESA (Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture) is dedicated to growing thriving communities through the power and joy of local food. Learn More »
