Oct 7, 2008

Strawberry Hill

In the South, tradition and family mean a lot, and sometimes new ventures can be disruptive – especially if they’re successful.

That’s the way it is at Strawberry Hill USA, in Chesnee, S. C. This old peach farm now has a strawberry name.

In 1995, the story goes, James Cooley was looking for another source of income after several bad years in peaches. His answer was to plant six acres of strawberries. Production was extremely successful. His daughter, Brandi Cooley-Easler, remembers the family conversation between her dad and mother, Kathi, as she wondered what ever they would do with all those strawberries.

So the next step was: Make a television commercial. Needless to say, it worked. Today, with nearly 80 acres of strawberries, it’s the largest strawberry operation in South Carolina.

With 800 acres of peaches, Strawberry Hill is a mighty big peach farm to have a strawberry name. But the name Strawberry Hill USA is probably better known than Cooley Brothers Peach Farm, the name it carried when James’ father Frank and Uncle Ansel owned it, or the name James E. Cooley Farms, which they use for the peach operation James owns and operates.

“Strawberry Hill has surpassed every expectation,” Brandi said, “and it has enhanced the peach business.”

James always claimed that being the last male with the Cooley name didn’t bother him. With four daughters, “where there are girls, there will be boys,” he said. And there are. But neither of his two sons-in-law is involved in the fruit business, which James operates with commanding authority. At age 48, he has plenty of energy and “he has his hands on everything,” Brandi said.

Two daughters seem destined to represent the next generation in the family business. Brandi is the oldest – a graduate of Clemson in marketing –and Bethani is the youngest – a new freshman at Clemson majoring in agricultural economics. The two middle sisters, Brooke and Brittani, have other careers. A grandson, Jameson Cooley Dearybury, is a year old. Brandi is expecting her second child early in the new year.

Brandi is vice president of marketing and James is company president. Mom runs the café – an enterprise started in 2000. Brandi runs strawberry and pumpkin tours and handles much of the marketing. James heads up peach and strawberry production, working with orchard managers and supervisors and about 120 H-2A workers from Mexico.

The farm was one of several in the Carolinas visited in June by fruit growers on tour with the International Fruit Tree Association.

Peaches in handle baskets

Back in 1956, the Cooley family farm built a modern packing shed and began an expansion in wholesale peaches. In 1988, they began to cultivate more local business and the next year converted the packing shed to a farm market. In 2000, they made another marketing innovation by packing all their peaches – not just those for local sale – in half-bushel handle baskets.

“We sell hand-packed fuzzy peaches,” Brandi said. “Each heaping basket holds about 27 pounds.”

Even though it adds $1.39 to the price of a half-bushel of peaches, people really like the package – and it works well for the Cooleys. The use the baskets for picking in the orchards, and they move directly to the sales area in the farm market.

“Everything is graded in the orchard,” James said. “We do a little touching up when they get here” – here being their retail market. The market was developed from the old packing shed and retains the old timber construction. The market is called the “old-tyme peach shed.”

For wholesale, the filled baskets are placed into racks James designed that hold up to 60 handle baskets of fruit. These peaches in the racks are placed into a storage and forced-air cooled before being wrapped with plastic for shipment to markets along the East Coast and into the Midwest.

Brandi and her sisters have played important roles in making the market successful. There was something really special about these young ladies selling peaches in handle baskets – and that is an image the farm wants to continue.

“That’s my little girl,” Brandi said about three-year-old Brooklyn, featured on the farm’s Web site, www.strawberryhillusa.com. In one picture, the little girl, dressed in a pink and lime green dress, is toting two pails of strawberries. She’s got a pink bow in her hair – and she’s barefoot.

“We’re just country folks who love what we do,” Brandi said. “This old country feeling is just what people want when they come here.

“We are simply a farm family that believes in genuine Southern kindness.”

“We tried u-pick for about 15 minutes one Saturday morning,” James said, laughing. “We pick everything ourselves.”

The old peach shed is a place where customers are “showered with good old country sincerity” by one or more of “the Cooley girls.” “The old peach barn is trimmed in red, white and blue, adorned with American flags, and ‘gussied up’ with colorful signs, barrels of flowers and the sweet aroma of tree-ripened peaches,” the Web site says.

Customers are encouraged to lean over a red barrel and let the juice pour as they indulge themselves in fresh peaches.

The farm grows 30 varieties that keep fresh peaches in front of customers from June to the end of September. They still sell about 60 acres of peaches a year for processing. They go to Gerber.

Strawberries in pails

Strawberries are picked and packed in fashion similar to the peaches. It takes about 100 pickers to handle all the berries, which sold last year for $11 a bucket in special large plastic pails.

While the fields are colorful and situated on hills surrounding an irrigation pond, people can walk there but they don’t pick. The fields are festooned with American flags – 238 of them, to be exact. One of the founders of the farm was a World War II veteran and his patriotic service is remembered still.

Each spring, Strawberry Hill offers field tours that draw about 10,000 first-grade school children. The tours cost $7 a child, and Brandi says they get a real education and a real experience. The adventure takes at least an hour and a half and can take longer if the kids stay and play. The tour includes a tractor ride through Strawberry Fields Forever, a lecture on how strawberries are raised and an opportunity to pick a strawberry, then lunch at the Hillbilly Clubhouse followed with homemade ice cream. Kids take home a coloring book and a pint of strawberries, which are packed in stackable boxes and given to the teachers for distribution back at school, thus avoiding disaster on the school bus.

The strawberries are raised as an annual crop. The land is tilled in August and planted about Sept. 20.

Beds are formed and drip lines are installed for irrigation and fertilizer delivery. The beds are covered with plastic film and the soil fumigated. Fourteen days later, holes are punched in the plastic to let the remaining fumigant gas out and then the berry plants are inserted into the holes. It takes 18,750 plants to plant an acre; they buy about 1.4 million plants a year.

The plants begin to bloom in mid-March and will probably require overhead frost protection. Then the real activity starts with the tours and the pickers filling those plastic pails.

After the strawberry season ends in August, the plastic beds are replanted to cantaloupe, which come to market when the peach season ends in late September.

The farm is still diversifying. They planted about 35 acres this year to blackberries and also planted about 10 acres of Asian pears.

In the fall, Brandi shifts her tours to the pumpkin fields, where kids get a somewhat scarier version by being subjected to the troll under the bridge. They get to build a scarecrow, feed the ducks, see the Three Little Pigs and visit a bull calf that has an unusual craving for human companionship. The fall pumpkin tours attract another 10,000 youngsters.

Strawberry Hill USA, Inc. is a “little piece of heaven on earth” that attracts tourist from across the South, says the Web site. It is open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. from April into October. The café is open year around.