Mar 4, 2011

Florida blueberry pioneer still planting away

For Alto Straughn, owner of Straughn Farms in Waldo, Fla., farming is much more than a business: It’s his life’s work. Not only has he been personally involved in agriculture for almost 40 years, his work through the University of Florida and the Florida Cooperative Extension Service has been instrumental in helping develop the state’s blueberry industry.

In 1959, Straughn became an Extension agent in Ocala and Marion County in central Florida.

“I was there for three years, and then I had the opportunity to go back to school at the University of Wisconsin and get my Ph.D. in Extension Administration,” he said.

For the next 20 years, Straughn worked statewide in Florida’s Cooperative Extension Service in program development and evaluation – while he continued to develop his farm.

“I farmed a little with my father-in-law before I became involved in Extension,” he said. “Then I started on my own in beef cattle in the mid 1960s. In the late 1960s, I got into the watermelon business and, in 1983, I got started on a small scale in blueberries, and I’ve been expanding some ever since. I’ve been in farming with different commodities at some level for 47 years.”

As Straughn was working in Extension, he had an opportunity to see many programs and much research going on statewide. Many things he saw made sense to him, so he experimented with them on his own farm; in essence, he did his own applied research based on what university researchers were only starting to try.

“If you think something will work, you try it,” he said. “Research is basic, but sometimes it takes many years to get something done. I tried things without having all the documented details, when it looked like they were going to work. So I’ve done a lot of applied research over the past 26 or 27 years, particularly with blueberries.”

Straughn started with 25 acres of blueberries, and added another 25 acres the following year.

“We planned to plant 25 acres each year for four years, but we ran into a lot of problems with soil and water pH, so we slowed down,” he said.

At the time, Straughn was planting rabbiteye blueberries, which are easy to grow but ripen about a month later than southern highbush blueberries.

“The berries we were planting were missing our market window,” he said.

At that time, only a few southern highbush blueberry varieties were available, and they tended to be soft, so they didn’t stand up to shipping.

Then Paul Lyrene, a blueberry breeder at the University of Florida, began developing and releasing new varieties of southern highbush blueberries.

“Doctor Lyrene’s varieties really helped with the initiation of the highbush blueberry industry in Florida,” Straughn said. “In fact, the entire blueberry industry in the state is based on the University of Florida breeding program that developed a number of new varieties between 15 and 25 years ago.”

When Straughn retired from the Extension service in 1989, he added acreage and planted many southern highbush blueberry varieties; his work showed that southern highbush varieties could create a profitable product for Florida growers.

The biggest challenge he ran into along the way was a disease issue with Botryosphaeria stem blight.

“It’s a fungus disease that’s been a major problem, and still is,” he said. “It kills plants within eight or ten years, so we have to do a lot of replanting. The best progress we’ve made is through the University of Florida breeding program, selecting varieties that have more resistance to blight.”

Another big challenge in recent years, Straughn said, has been labor for hand harvesting.

“This is a problem for all agriculture in Florida, particularly tomatoes, peppers and strawberries,” he said.

Although he has mechanical harvesters, Straughn said, he only uses them at the end of the season to clean up the last berries that are frozen or processed.

“We have some color sorters and soft berry sorters that are relatively new technology,” he said. “Having them makes it more feasible for us to use the mechanical harvesters when we need to, because those two sorters do a good job of getting the bruised and split berries out so you can still fresh pack the rest of the berries.”

One problem that’s emerging is water availability for freeze protection.

“When it freezes, we have to run a lot of water in a very short period of time, and the water management districts are playing hardball right now with the allocation of water for freeze protection,” Straughn said. “That isn’t just on blueberries, but on strawberries around Plant City and other crops as well. Right now, getting permits for freeze protection is a major challenge.”

To help address this issue at the farm level, Straughn is making cultural changes to reduce freeze damage to plants.

“We’re putting up a lot of Spanish high tunnels, so we only have to use about a third as much water for freeze protection,” he said. “They’re like plastic greenhouses. This is another applied research project to see if we can make it economical to do that, because they’re labor intensive and they’re expensive. We’re working on anything we can to try to minimize water for freeze protection.”

At age 77, Straughn is still planting blueberries.

“When we get through planting what we’re planting now, we’ll have about 700 acres of blueberries,” he said.

And he’s still growing more than just blueberries.

“For the last 20-plus years we’ve grown about 600 to 800 acres of watermelons,” he said. “Some of that is share-cropped with growers, but I finance and control the marketing and I grow watermelons of my own as well. I’ve been growing watermelons of my own for 42 consecutive years now.”

He also has a cow-calf operation with about 220 brood cows.

Looking ahead, Straughn said he would like to see his blueberry acreage and yield continue to increase for the next few years.

“It comes down to a question of how long the market is going to remain good,” he said. “I think it will be good enough that we’ll continue to expand, but we have to look at it pretty hard because labor availability is so uncertain right now that nobody really knows what’s going to happen. That’s a real caution light right now for expansion.”

One of his goals, Straughn said, is to continue to improve the quality of blueberries available to Florida growers.

“I still have a very close relationship with the University of Florida and their breeding program, and I grow a lot of new varieties on my farm,” he said. “We’re working on improving the taste, the firmness, and the shipping ability of blueberries, and trying to move toward varieties that can be harvested mechanically.”

By Carolee Anita Boyles