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Will Climate Change Threaten Strawberry Yields? [1]
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Date: 2025-05-28
Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
On Mother’s Day weekend, my girlfriend and I were winding down a mountain highway towards our hometown in South Carolina, AC blasting. We stomped on the breaks somewhere near the state line where a sign the size of a pickup truck advertised fresh strawberries in red, uneven handwriting. It was damp that day, and the ink streaked the poster board. We had been on the hunt for fresh strawberries all morning.
Strawberry season reminds me of childhood outings with my grandpa, the bench seats in his red Chevy, and the ice cream we bought at a U-pick farm that melted into his beard. Once my sister ate so many strawberries that her skin blew up. She had to get around the house in my dad’s rolling office chair for a week on account of her hive-induced cankles. She still eats strawberries, though perhaps with more caution nowadays.
I love strawberries. They are perfect fodder for nostalgia.
But that’s enough sentimentalizing. Let’s get to the data. In this edition of the Rural Index, I’ll be analyzing strawberry yields over the past several decades and the changing climate that threatens to shrink them.
Since 1980, strawberry production in the United States has increased threefold, measured in pounds of fresh strawberries harvested nationwide. In 2023, the most recent year of available data, American farmers produced 2.7 billion pounds of fresh strawberries, up from 700 million pounds in 1980.
The 2023 strawberry harvest was worth over $3.3 billion, compared to $288 million in 1980.
This dataset comes from the Economic Research Service (ERS), a branch of the USDA that analyzes economic trends for policy makers, journalists, and researchers.
Overall growth during this time was due in part to an increase in the number of acres devoted to strawberry production. Harvestable acreage grew by 20,000 acres between 1980 and 2023.
New production methods – such as growing in substrate under controlled conditions and using new chemical inputs – have also increased the efficiency of strawberry yields in recent years. In 1980, American growers harvested 19,400 pounds of strawberries per acre, compared to 48,500 pounds per acre in 2023.
(I want to be careful about not equating rurality with agriculture. Most rural economies are not ag-centric, and only a fraction of the rural population is farmers. But I don’t have reliable strawberry data on counties, which is the scale I usually use for rural categorizations. So, in lieu of perfect data, I’m equating strawberry production with rural strawberry production. I feel comfortable doing that because most agricultural activity does happen in rural America, even if most of rural America is not dependent on agriculture as the predominant driver of the economy. It might not be perfect, but it’s all we’ve got!)
But despite all the advances in agricultural technology, climate change and pest infestations continue to plague the strawberry industry.
The lygus bug, for example, contributes to annual losses of about $18 million in California, where strawberries are a $1.8 billion business. Lygus bugs are small, flat pests that damage strawberries by eating the berry’s flesh and hollowing them out from the inside. Spider mites are also destructive pests that cause discoloration and webbing around the fruits, leading to substantial yield losses.
To make matters worse, climate change also leads to increasingly mild winters, which can exacerbate pest problems. When winters aren’t cold enough to exterminate pests, they can emerge earlier in the season and create damage all year long.
Rising temperatures then cause higher rates of evapotranspiration, the part of the water cycle where water returns to the atmosphere, creating more powerful hurricanes, more flooding, and ultimately, more destruction of crops.
“We had some berries on the ground that went through [Hurricane Milton],” said Florida strawberry farmer Matt Parke in an interview for WUSF. “We had 90 acres on the ground. Out of those 90 acres, we had to replace about 40 acres, and we also had to fix about 200 acres of plastic. So, all in all, we were about $3,500 to $3,800 an acre over budget this year.”
Climate change is complicated, and perhaps we’ll keep finding new ways to delay its impact. Only time will tell how a changing globe will affect our favorite summer fruits and the memories they evoke.
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