Good weather conditions in April and May caused Connecticut strawberry fields to ripen earlier than normal, which meant berry picking season started in late May this year.
But farmers warn pick-your-own berry enthusiasts to act fast, because picking season, which only lasts a few weeks, will end sooner than usual.
The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station is predicting 2025 will have one of the smallest strawberry crops on record because of a trifecta of troubles that hit the Nutmeg State in 2023: historic flooding, pollution from Canadian wildfires and arrival of new diseases.
“Basically fields that normally would have been highly productive this year started to go downhill and so almost every field that was planted in the ground in 2023 that I've been able to survey has had some residual rot,” said Nathaniel Westrick, a plant pathologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.
The farmers he spoke with have about 50% fewer productive strawberry fields and it could take years to get back up to full production.
“When you have a field filled with root disease, you can't just remove the strawberries and replant,” he said. “You have to remove them and you need to rotate off of that, into something that the diseases aren't going to be able to propagate on.”
State scientists also identified three new fungal related diseases for the first time in Connecticut that devastated fields: Fusarium Wilt, Anthracnose Crown Rot and Neopestalotiopsis Leaf, Fruit and Crown Rot.
Normally the sun’s UV rays help kill fungal spores, but the air pollution caused by the Canadian Wildfires blocked them and allowed the diseases to spread.
“The plants were more stressed out because there's a lot more ozone in the air, but also we just didn't see the sun for weeks,” Westrick said.
Strawberries can be an economic anchor
Westrick said strawberries are one of the earliest crops to ripen so the money earned from selling them is an anchor which can carry farmers until the next crops are ready to harvest.
He said the 120 Connecticut farmers who grow strawberries can earn between $40,000 to $70,000 an acre off of a successful strawberry field.
Farmers often grow a variety of strawberry plants so that berries ripen at different times, helping to extend out the strawberry picking season.
But Westrick said one of the later producing plants, the AC Valley Sunset, is incredibly sensitive to fungal diseases and “and it's just gone in a lot of these farms, it just can't be grown.”
So Westrick urged Connecticut residents not to wait to get outside and pick some juicy strawberries at a Connecticut farm.
