Tampa Bay growers are rebounding, one year after the Coronavirus lockdown left many of them financially devastated. According to Matt Parke, farm manager of Parkesdale Farms, 2020 was one of the bad years for Parkesdale Farms. The Plant City farm is known for its strawberries but also grows some vegetables. Its fruits ships to places up the east coast, to as far as Canada. Parkes says 80% of his strawberry crop was picked before the country went into lockdown last March.
“One the 14th is when the world stopped turning and we stopped picking that day,” Parke said. This is because a large amount of his produce goes to the foodservice industry, but with restaurant dining rooms empty, and hotels and cruise ships closed, the demand quickly dried up.
Some 53 acres of crops were destroyed. Parke told ABC Action News that the panic buying at grocery stores at start of the pandemic is why Parkesdale Farms survived the pandemic: “If we wouldn’t have had the market going into the pandemic that we had, we probably would have been in a whole other situation, but we had a little bit of a good market for about three weeks leading up to the shutdown and that helped us get through that hump.”
The Florida Strawberry Growers Association spoke of a consumption shift, with more people buying farm-fresh fruits and vegetables, now critical in sustaining local growers.
“When the pandemic hit a lot of people really started thinking about what they eat and trying to stay healthy, so you had this pretty large movement across the nation about making healthy choices and strawberries are actually a super-food,” said Kenneth Parker, Executive Director of Florida Strawberry Growers Association.
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