Rain hurts strawberries

• By CHAD CALDER
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Apr 4, 2009 - Page: 1B

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Visitors to the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival this weekend should be prepared to pay a little more than usual for a flat of berries, as the recent heavy rains have battered the crop and reduced yields.

Still, festival organizers are expecting attendance to approach 350,000 for the festival, which started Friday evening and runs through Sunday.

The event has a different provider for the amusement park rides this year, festival chairman Jody Borne said, and has more food booths (more than 100 booths from 65 farmers and organizations) and 18 bands.

Regina Bracy, a professor with the LSU AgCenter’s Hammond Research Station, said the quantity of berries for the festival might be down by about a quarter, but she and area farmers said the berries at the festival will be sweet and up to the usual standards of quality.

Bracy said the heavy rainstorms last month had farmers throwing out about 80 percent of their berries.

Dale Robertson, this year’s festival king, said the rain he got two weeks ago had him stripping all the berries off his plants and starting over.

“There’s not going to be a whole lot of berries at the festival, but they will be there,” he said, estimating they will cost about $20 a flat.

Robertson said anyone selling flats — at the festival or anywhere else — should be happy to roll out the contents of one of the pints for inspection. He also suggested customers ask which varieties the raccoons are eating, since they always go for the sweetest ones.

Borne said festival attendance has boomed in the last decade, with many years breaking the previous festival record.

He said the festival has kept up its marketing efforts, promoting it on billboards as far away as Mobile, Ala., and advertising as far north as Memphis, Tenn.

Borne pointed out that, besides the farmers, all the vendors are nonprofit civic organizations. Admission is free, but attendees are asked to bring a canned good for the local Food Bank.

The crowds will be a welcome sight for Rhonda Poché, a strawberry farmer from Holden who has been selling at the festival for 24 years.

“I’m not saying that we’re not going to be picking any strawberries, but our quantities are way, way down,” she said. “Normally by this time we’re picking seven (hundred), 800 flats a day. Right now … we’re picking 200 flats.”