Destruction of Strawberries is a Crime

The practice of destroying food crops is no new practice among produce farmers. It has been going on for decades for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which appears to be money. With the economic downturn that that United States has been faced with recently this practice has escalated quite a bit. This practice is a waste of perfectly good food and by not letting people have a chance to salvage these products the farmers are performing a huge injustice against the poor and needy.
This phenomenon has been especially apparent in the strawberry market recently. Farmers can usually get about 20- 30 dollars a flat before March (Velde). This is because this is the month that California and the northern states join the market and the number of strawberries in the market is increased. Because of an unusually cold winter and a series of freezing nights the plants staled in their production of the fruit until late. Cold weather also shocks the plants into producing more blossoms, and eventually more fruit than is usual (Roesch). Because of this the strawberry market was flooded once everything kicked into gear since at the same time that the areas better suited for strawberry-growing got going the northern states and California also were joining the market whereas usually it is staggered, spreading out the amount of berries in the market at any one point. The flooding of the market has caused the prices of strawberries to fall to about $5.90-$6.90 a flat and down at that price range it is cheaper for farmers to just let their berries rot in the fields and plow them under. Some of the farmers say that they sometimes turn their crops over to being U-Pick farms so that people can just come and pick what they want but injury liability keeps many of them from taking a chance of doing that. Only a handful of farms in the country keep that practice alive. Some just plow them under right away and try to plant another type of crop in order to ry and salvage some of their losses. A lot of farmers are just hoping to break even this year and will consider that a successful year considering the bad season.
I can understand why farmers do these things to their crops. This is their living and they need to make money in order to support themselves and their family. There just seems like there is something terribly wrong about letting tasty, nutritious, healthy food go to waste like that. There are a lot of people throughout the world that would go through great lengths to get their hands on any type of food and throwing them away seems like a big injustice to their plight (Speak Without Interruption).It seems that greed is one of the biggest reasons these farmers are destroying their crop s(Hopper). There have to be better alternative solutions to this problem than just plowing under the ground for fertilizer. I see a lot of good in farmers that turn their crop over to the public and let them pick their own berries. This is not only beneficial to the consumer in that they get free or very reduced priced berries, but also good for the farmer since they may gain a good reputation from the public and they may increase the amount of berries they buy from them each year in order to support a local business. Even though there is a risk of liability since they could get hurt on your property, there must be a waiver of some sort that they could sign that would keep the farmer from being able to be sued or taken to trial in the chance that something does happen to one of their patrons while on their farm. They could even pick the berries and donate them to a homeless shelter or soup kitchen to help feed the needy. I would imagine that would be tax deductable which would be beneficial for both the soup kitchen and the farmer. I think that there is a lot of responsibility that can be placed on the shoulders of our food producers in this nation to be leaders of their communities and show that they can make a difference to the people in their towns.
Sources
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/agriculture/article1082628.ece
http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/site/2010/03/dont-plow-food-under-give-it-away/
http://www.bucknellconservatives.org/main/2010/03/strawberries-frozen-in-florida/
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/strawberry-farmers-destroy-crops/story?id=10219820&page=2