Strawberries have long been a beloved crop in Connecticut, but officials say they're being threatened. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station says strawberry crops have been taking a hit because of extreme weather patterns.
"When you accumulate all those stresses on the plant, it really is kind of like a 1-2-3 punch on a lot of them," said Jamie Jones, of Jones Family Farms in Shelton. A tipping came in 2023 on many Connecticut farms due to a mixture of historic flooding and air pollution caused by the Canadian wildfires. It's likely the weather extremes triggered new strawberry-related diseases that were documented by the state.
"In the last two years, we've also had the introduction of multiple new fungal diseases of strawberries that have been in other parts of the world and other parts of the U.S., but we've never seen in New England before," said Nate Westrick, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. State scientists estimate that most of the strawberry acreage that survived the 2023 season now harbors lingering root damage, which continues to affect yields.
"If we can try and keep the plant really healthy – in about a one- to two-month window when the disease problem is really bad, we might actually be able to get it through that danger point and then…basically it can go dormant, and we can get potentially another full crop out of it the following year," said Westrick.
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