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| Mackenzie Mattinson sells strawberries at the Oxford Berry Farm's roadside stand in Oxford. |
Ah, the idyllic
days of strawberry season.
The early morning
sun shines on your back as you kneel between the rows of plants, fingers seeking
the firm, ripe berries. The berries are sweet and plump, and red juice runs
down your chin when you bite into one, having snuck a taste of that marks
summer’s true arrival.
Or maybe it’s my
memories that are idyllic.
“The bugs are bad
and it gets hot,” 15-year-old Taylor Mattinson says.
But picking berries
for five hours every morning certainly hasn’t made her sick of them. When I
arrive at my great-niece’s house for an interview, she’s eating sliced
strawberries from a big bowl.
Can’t get enough
of that taste of summer.
Taylor, and her
twin sister Mackenzie, are pickers, two in a long line – literally – of
teenagers working at Cindy Thompson’s ten acres of strawberry fields just
outside Oxford. And just like those kids, strawberry picking is now high-tech.
Taylor describes the
difference between her experience two years ago and now.
“You picked your
strawberries then you set them behind you. When you were done, you collected
them all into your flats and set them at the end of your row. Then you said how
many you picked,” she says. “Now, when you finish two flats, you go to the
supervisor and she has a scanner and stickers. You have a picker card with a
bar code so she scans the card and a sticker and then they put the sticker on
the flat.”
According to Cindy
Thompson, it’s all about accountability and traceability.
“A berry doesn’t
get to market without me knowing where it comes from,” she says of the computer
software and equipment that allows her to track every level of the operation. “On
my end, the sticker tells me what time the flat was picked, who picked it, what
field it was picked in and what variety of strawberry was picked. It’s the way everything
is going. You have to accountable for what you sell.”
What a difference
from when the picking at their new strawberry fields started in 2011, and from when
she was a teenager picking berries on the same farm.
“When we started
out, we just had punch cards, same as what we did growing up,” Cindy says.
“They brought the flat down and you punched card but once that went on the
truck and left, you didn’t know whose was whose and what was what.”
The demand for
traceability is the way of the world, she says, but it also allows her to
monitor the quality of her product. If she receives a comment about too many
green berries or praise for really good berries, she can take that information
right back to the picker.
“That lets me
offer quality with accountability to the pickers. It means they can’t get away
with anything.”
That doesn’t
bother Mackenzie Mattinson. “I think it’s a good idea,” she says. “That way the
farm doesn’t get as much of the blame if something goes wrong. It means a lot
of responsibility for me, the picker, but it’s fair.”
This is the first
year for the scanner system at Cindy’s farm but the bigger farms have been
using them for a while.
“Farming isn’t
what it used to be for any farmer,” Cindy tells me. “I haven’t used the
computer program for long but I’m at the point where I can say it’s making my
job easier. It was a crash course to learn it and I’m learning it on the fly but
I like it.”
And she’ll get a
lot of use out of it. She, along with her husband Kent, also planted
ever-bearing strawberries using a black plastic system that draws and traps
heat to create a longer growing season.
“Once we’re done
with our July strawberries, people don’t have to go back to a Florida or
California strawberry,” explains Cindy. “We’ll have local berries right up to
frost.”
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