The central coast of California, with its Mediterranean climate, is an important strawberry growing region. Strawberry production here, as in many other locales, is highly dependent on expensive, energy-intensive, and environmentally harmful off-farm inputs. The current system of industrial, conventional strawberry production in California can be traced back to the early 1960s. Before that time, growers treated strawberries as a perennial crop, rotating each field out of strawberries for several years. However, when the soil fumigant methyl bromide (MeBr) was introduced in the 1960s, growers started to manage strawberries as an annual crop, planted year after year and fumigated with this pesticide on the same piece of land. In the early 1980s, as interest in organic food became a potential market force in agriculture and issues of pesticide safety and environmental quality came to the fore, farmers began to respond. For 30 years, the University of California, Santa Cruz has been working with farmers to study this process.

In this context, a particularly fruitful partnership emerged between the two of us: an academic (Steve Gliessman) and a strawberry farmer (Jim Cochran). It was serendipitous that Jim’s first plantings at Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, California were just over the fence dividing his field from the home Steve was living in at the time. Over that fence our talk about the transition to organic strawberry production led to the first side-by-side comparative trial. At Jim’s farm, our thinking and our practices evolved, using his land, varieties and practices, his workers, and many of his resources.