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Domestic strawberries are considered a summertime fruit. But U.S. Department of Agriculture
researcher Kim Lewers would like to have them around all year. Lewers is an Agricultural
Research Service geneticist in Beltsville, Maryland where she has designed a way to grow
strawberries in low tunnels…basically little greenhouses. She’s been able to add two
more strawberry growing seasons in her test plot. We’ve got the April season; we’ve
got the regular May, June season. And then we’ve got a July season. So, we’ve tripled
or more the times of the year that people in Maryland can eat locally grown strawberries.
Lewers research is focused on east coast growing conditions and weather. She says the low tunnels
basically keep the plants cool and dry in the summer and warm in the winter and that
leads to good, healthy fruit. Not only are we getting lots of beautiful fruit, but they
are staying disease free longer after they’re harvested. Lewers developed the production
system to help her breeding program. Without the new production system, she says she would
not be able to breed locally adapted varieties that fruit for months instead of weeks in
Maryland. But local growers can use the system now using California-bred varieties that normally
could not survive the heat of a Maryland summer. Year round production would be great news
for growers of this lucrative crop. They are perhaps the most valuable crop per acre that
you can grow. Their value per acre is around thirty nine thousand dollars. Lewers says
she is aiming for year-round locally grown strawberries up and down the east coast. Florida,
Georgia, North Carolina, up the mid Atlantic, up into the northeast and that really will
ensure that we have a yearlong strawberry crop. That’s my hope. For the U.S. Department
of Agriculture I’m Bob Ellison.