Floods and Fungus Take a Bite Out of CT Strawberry Crop

By Jennifer Ahrens

Good weather conditions in April and May caused Connecticut strawberry fields to ripen earlier than normal, which meant berry picking season started in late May this year.

But farmers warn pick-your-own berry enthusiasts to act fast, because picking season, which only lasts a few weeks, will end sooner than usual.

The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station is predicting 2025 will have one of the smallest strawberry crops on record because of a trifecta of troubles that hit the Nutmeg State in 2023: historic flooding, pollution from Canadian wildfires and arrival of new diseases.

“Basically fields that normally would have been highly productive this year started to go downhill and so almost every field that was planted in the ground in 2023 that I've been able to survey has had some residual rot,” said Nathaniel Westrick, a plant pathologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

The farmers he spoke with have about 50% fewer productive strawberry fields and it could take years to get back up to full production.

“When you have a field filled with root disease, you can't just remove the strawberries and replant,” he said. “You have to remove them and you need to rotate off of that, into something that the diseases aren't going to be able to propagate on.”