Out-of-season strawberries come with a toll in Japan
In Japan, the strawberry crop peaks in wintertime — a chilly season of picture-perfect berries, the most immaculate ones selling for hundreds of dollars apiece to be given as special gifts.
Japan’s strawberries come with an environmental toll. To re-create an artificial spring in the winter months, farmers grow their out-of-season delicacies in huge greenhouses heated with giant, gas-guzzling heaters.
“We’ve come to a point where many people think it’s natural to have strawberries in winter,” said Satoko Yoshimura, a strawberry farmer in Minoh, Japan, who until last season burned kerosene to heat her greenhouse all winter long.
But as she kept filling up her heater’s tank with fuel, she said, she started to think: “What are we doing?”
Fruits and veggies are grown in greenhouses all over the world, of course.
The Japan strawberry industry has carried it to such an extreme, however, that most farmers have stopped growing strawberries during the far-less-lucrative warmer months, the actual growing season.
Instead, in summertime, Japan imports much of its strawberry supply.
It’s an example of how modern expectations of fresh produce year round can require surprising amounts of energy, contributing to a warming climate in return for having strawberries — or tomatoes or cucumbers — even when temperatures are plunging.
Until several decades ago, Japan’s strawberry season started in the spring and ran into early summer.
But the Japanese market has traditionally placed a high value on first-of-theseason or “hatsumono” produce, from tuna to rice and tea. A crop claiming the hatsumono mantle can bring many times normal prices.
As the country’s consumer economy took off, the hatsumono race spilled over into strawberries.
Farms started to compete to bring their strawberries to market earlier and earlier in the year.
Now, strawberries are a major Christmas staple in Japan. Some farmers have started to ship first-ofthe-season strawberries in November, Miyazaki said.
Japan’s swing toward cultivating strawberries in freezing weather has made strawberry farming significantly more energy intensive. According to analyses, the emissions footprint of strawberries in Japan is roughly eight times that of grapes and more than 10 times that of mandarin oranges.
In Japan, the energy required to grow strawberries hasn’t proven to be just a climate burden. It has also made cultivation expensive, hurting farmers’ bottom lines.
“It all comes down to heating,” said Naoki Yoshikawa, a researcher in environmental sciences at the University of Shiga Prefecture in western Japan, who led the produce emissions study. “And we looked at all aspects, including transport, or what it takes to produce fertilizer — even then, heating had the biggest footprint.”
In general, transportation of food has less of a climate impact than the way in which it is produced, said Shelie Miller, a University of Michigan professor who focuses on climate, food and sustainability. One study found tomatoes grown locally in heated greenhouses in the Britain had a higher carbon footprint compared with tomatoes grown in Spain (outdoors, and in-season) and shipped to British supermarkets.