A lot of factors
can affect how profitable Florida’s blueberry market is. So far this year, though, things are looking good for Sunshine State growers.
The professional pickers’ fingers fly through rows of bushes at Tom West Blueberries in search of indigo-colored berries among the green and violet fruit.
The next two months are make-or-break for blueberry growers in Central Florida, whose business hinges on factors they can’t control: the weather, labor, the market — and their competitors’ luck.
“You definitely have to do a lot of praying,” said Stacy (West) Willliams, 41, who runs Tom West Blueberries in Ocoee with her brother, Scott West, and their father, Milton West.
Florida berries usually start ripening by early March, but Georgia’s crop nips at the Sunshine State’s heels. When Georgia fruit floods the market, prices drop, making it more cost-effective for Florida farmers to leave their late-season berries on the bushes or open them up to the u-pick market, said Dudley Calfee, president of the Florida Blueberry Growers Association.
This year, Florida is expected to benefit from Georgia’s misfortune. Growers there lost up to 80 percent of their berries in freezing temperatures last month.
Florida’s 2017 crop already was expected to exceed last year’s. An unusually warm No-
vember and December in 2015 prevented the bushes from getting the cold days they need to produce abundant fruit in 2016, and a cool early spring further delayed the season, said Jeff Williamson, a blueberry extension specialist at the University of Florida, which has developed most of the varieties grown in the state.
“Things are moving along at a much better pace than they were last year,” said Williamson, a professor of horticulture.
The wholesale price this year is expected to be $3 to $4 a pound, said Teddy Koukoulis, director of blueberry operations for Wish Farms in Plant City, one of the larger berry marketers in the state.
The value of Florida’s blueberry industry is estimated at $82 million, making it the U.S. leader in fresh berries, U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show.
Blueberry growers tout their product as healthful — the American Heart Association includes it on its list of superfoods — as well as tasty.
But picking the berries is hard work. Few Americans want the job, and the migrant workers who will do it leave Florida toward the end of the season to follow the blueberries as they ripen in Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey and Michigan, Calfee said.
At Tom West Blueberries, only five pickers showed up Thursday, but 40 came to work Wednesday and picked 7,000 pounds, Williams said. Most Florida varieties must be picked by hand because machines bruise the berries and knock some to the ground, wasting about 13 percent more marketable berries than human pickers, according to a 2016 UF study.
The West family started out as citrus
farmers, but grew weary of contending with freezes and citrus-greening disease and switched to blueberries in 2011. Founder Tom West, known as T.S., was 92 when he died in 2011. The farm’s u-pick operation, on Orlando Avenue next to Ocoee Elementary School, opened for the season Saturday.
More growers have entered the market in the past decade, increasing the competition, Koukoulis said.
Southern Hill Farms near Clermont was a nursery for ornamental trees until it branched out into blueberries in 2010.
The Hill family has turned the farm into an agribusiness, offering school field trips, food trucks on the weekend, hayrides, homemade blueberry desserts, picnic tables and, for the first time this year, restrooms and a tour of the fields from a converted cotton picker with a deck on top.
“The years the market is horrible, the u-pick is a saving grace,” said Brooke Hill, 29, whose husband, Michael, is a fourthgeneration farmer. “It’s a way to generate revenue. It’s a way to get the fruit out of there when there are no pickers.”
But the majority of the business — 90 percent at Southern Hill Farms — remains devoted to the commercial harvest.
“If you can have a few good years and a few bad years it usually averages out and works out OK — if you’re persistent and knowledgeable and you continue to try to innovate your operation,” Calfee said.