Bad weather has reduced the yield from Irish strawberry crops by as much as 75 per cent this year, Teagasc said yesterday.
The biggest losses in yield are in outdoor fruit farms in Wexford, Dublin and Meath and Teagasc's soft fruit adviser, Mr Eamonn Kehoe, believes some fruit growers in these areas are facing financial ruin.
He said growers could expect a yield of 25 tonnes per hectare in a good year but this would be down by up to 75 per cent in the case of strawberries grown outdoors and by up to 30 per cent in strawberries grown in plastic tunnels this season. "You walk through fields and the fruit is split rotten. It's a disaster," Mr Kehoe said.
Mr James Kearns, who grows about 30 acres of strawberries in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, said half of his crop was lost. Some 25 acres of it is outdoors.
Part of the crop is harvested for supermarkets and the other half for processing into Chivers jam. "I'm picking for jam for the last two weeks and it's a disaster. The picking is small and scarce," he said.
One of the largest soft fruit farms in the State is owned by Wexford man Mr John Greene who grows 100 acres of strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries and other soft fruits. Just five acres of the farm is covered.
He said he lost at least 50 per cent of his produce in May and June. "The only reason we can survive is we have so much fruit. We plant more than we think we need so we have good fruit to sell," he said.
Mr Kehoe said low yields on most soft fruit farms had meant strawberries had to be imported from the Netherlands and Belgium, which would be unheard of by mid-summer in other years.
"There is a shortage of fruit. A lot of roadside stalls have not operated at all this year. The fruit is just not there," he said.
He said a fruit grower could normally expect a margin of €44,000 per hectare on an outdoor strawberry crop that was well managed. This could fall to €11,000 per hectare this year.
"The vast majority of the commercial fruit-growers are purely fruit-growers and have nothing else to fall back on. I've seen guys who are now up the creek. Some are totally dependant on income from strawberries. I think some of them will go out of business."
Even if the weather improved at this stage, Mr Kehoe said it would be too late. "The damage has been done. The outdoor crop is already a write-off".
Mr Kearns hires 40 Polish people for a month every year to pick strawberries but he says there's little work for them now and some are trying to get early flights home. "Usually pickers would pick a 12 lb basket in 15 minutes. Today it's taking them about 1½ hours, so there's no profit in it for anybody," he said.
As chairman of the Irish Soft Fruit Growers Association and chairman of the Soft Fruit Committee of the Irish Farmers' Association, Mr Kearns said some growers had lost all their fruit.
"The weather has been so cold and so wet that the bees haven't pollinated the fruit so there is a lot of misshapen fruit. These actually don't look like a strawberry at all and they are useless. And some fruit hasn't ripened at all and these look like a very small white dot. In other cases mould has set in."
Mr Kearns said he would be seeking to meet the Minister for Agriculture to make a case for compensation for affected growers.