Concurrently, fresh strawberry production has
become spatially concentrated: California pro-
duction is now almost completely (99 per cent)
contained within coastal counties stretching from
San Diego in the south to Santa Cruz in the north.
Within those counties almost all strawberries are
grown within three miles of the ocean, where
temperatures are moderated year round by cool
ocean currents (Wells, 1996: 31–2). The farms
on which they are grown are as variegated as the
coastal topography. Three main ethnic groups
farm strawberries in the Central Coast area:
Mexicans, Japanese, and ‘Anglos’.^3 In the late
1980s, Mexicans were the most recent to move
into the rank of farmers, were the most numer-
ous, tended to have farms with the smallest
acreage and the most marginal land, utilized the
lowest amounts of technology, had the fewest
improvements upon the land, picked the fewest
crates per acre, and reaped the lowest value per
crate of strawberries produced. Japanese, many
of whose families began as sharecroppers in the
inter-war period and moved back into strawberry
production after their release from the World
War II concentration camps, tended to have
medium-sized farms and were the second most
numerous. They tended to pay their workers
more, and to provide more benefits, than did
their Anglo and Mexican counterparts. While
Anglo farmers were the fewest, they had the
largest farms and were the most capital intensive.
They received the highest return per crate of
strawberries picked, and tended to occupy the
best farming lands (Wells, 1996: 122–3). The
Central Coast strawberry landscape was – and
still is – thus a patchwork of farms that differ by
size, capital intensity, and quality of production.
This patchwork of land and labor systems is
held together by a network of purchasers, ship-
pers, and marketers. In the late 1980s, seven
firms (two grower-shippers, one cooperative, and
four independent shippers) handled 60 per cent
of the total fresh berry crop, and only two firms
handled about 30 per cent. Despite deep concen-
tration in marketing, the market remains rela-
tively competitive, in part because demand for
fresh berries, particularly in the traditional ‘off-
season’ continues to grow. The growing and mar-
keting of both processed and fresh strawberries are
regulated and promoted by two ‘advisory boards’
established in the wake of market upheavals in
the 1950s. These boards work to promote the
competitive advantage of the California straw-
berry industry (including developing advertising
campaigns, supporting research into new vari-
etals and cultivation techniques, and regulating
the dialectic of competition and cooperation
necessary to the success of the industry).If marketing organizations and the advisory
boards hold together the network of strawberry
producers, then this network, like the strawberry
itself, is made possible only by physical labor.
Tending and harvesting strawberries is painstak-
ing, and painful, work. Strawberry growing is
one of the most labor intensive of all California
crops. As Wells notes, ‘the care with which
workers select, handle, and pack the fragile fruit
is the greatest single determinant of market
price’ (Wells, 1996: 49). Harvest work is usually
paid by piece-rate, but even so, pickers are
expected to ‘clean’ the rows by picking and dis-
carding misshapen, damaged, or spoiled fruit and
dead leaves.
Workers call strawberries ‘the fruit of the
devil’. Strawberry picking and plant maintenance
require that workers spend the day doubled over
at the waist as they work their way down a row,
often standing and stretching only when they
reach the end or when they have filled a box.
Back injuries are exceedingly common. So too
are respiratory ailments from inhaling pesticides
and dust (Wells, 1996: 169), severed fingers and
hands, and progressively developed allergic
reactions to strawberry juice, flowers, and leaves.
Strawberry picking is dangerous, and in that
regard is not unlike agricultural work as a whole
(which is the second most hazardous occupation
in the country: Bugarin and Lopez, 1998: 25).
Mortality in farming occupations is five and a
half times the national average, and the average
lifespan of farmworkers in America is only two-
thirds that of other Americans (Bugarin and
Lopez, 1998: 25; Myers and Hard, 1995). Acute
and chronic injuries are common, and access to
health care is spotty at best (Mobed et al., 1992).
Danger does not only dwell in the fields. Rather
violence, both chronic and episodic and often
occurring quite distant from the point of produc-
tion, is a fact of life, indeed an integral ingredient,
of the agricultural economy (Mitchell, 2001).
The vast majority of strawberry pickers, like
agricultural workers as a whole in California, are
foreign-born, and in the 1990s a majority may
have been undocumented (‘illegal’).
During the 1990s, the militarization of the
Mexico–US border has made the passage into
the United States exceptionally dangerous. In the
five years after Operation Gatekeeper – a pro-
gram of fence-building and stepped-up border
patrols in urban San Diego county – was insti-
tuted in 1994, deaths along the US–Mexico
border in California have increased from around
20 per year to nearly 100 per year (Ellingwood,
1999; Gross, 1999; Nevins, 2001; Smith, 1999).
Many of these deaths are from exposure or dehy-
dration as undocumented immigrants seeking to236 LANDSCAPE3029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 236