Disease impacts Pfafftown strawberry farms

FORSYTH COUNTY, N.C. (WGHP) — A new disease is emerging in strawberries all along the East Coast. It has many local farmers worried about the cash crop.

North Carolina is the third biggest producer of strawberries. This season, state officials tell farmers the disease is making the crop too risky to grow.

Brent Jones , the owner of Jones Strawberry Farm, says this is the first time in 16 years he isn’t growing a single strawberry.

“Two weeks ago, we knew nothing about this,” Jones said.

A sudden warning from the state caught many North Carolina farmers off guard. A fungus is hitting strawberries grown along the East Coast hard.

Just days before Jones was ready to plant strawberries, he got the news of the fungus.

“We got a call from our supplier saying that they were infected, and they would advise us to not plant,” Jones said. “We plant roughly around 12,000 plants per acre. We grow three acres per year. We had around 36,000 plants ordered.”

That’s typically 36,000 pounds of strawberries they can make a profit off of. This year, they will have nothing to sell.

“This is solely what we grow … The risk outweighed the benefit. It was a significant risk of total crop failure. So it is going to be a significant impact to the industry, to the economy of North Carolina as a whole,” Jones said.

Bill Foote with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture says this isn’t just a hit to North Carolina.

“It’s global, too. Even Mexico is trying to buy plants now,” he said.

As for the strawberries that do survive, when they end up on the grocery store shelf, consumers will pay.

“You might see some higher prices. I don’t want to scare people off, and I always encourage them to buy local,” Foote said.

The Jones Strawberry Farm is hoping to make a profit in a different way.

“We also run a corn maze that doesn’t nearly produce the volume of customers as our strawberry field does, but it does help offset the loss,” Jones sad.

The Jones Strawberry Farm will be opening its corn maze on Sept. 14.

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