“Them’s small pickins”

Every strawberry grower intuitively knows that small fruit cost more to harvest. We tend to reflect on this especially much in the later part of the season when “them’s pickin’s are small,” However, we rarely QUANTIFY the cost of small fruit. 

Our Auckland strawberry variety trial collects data on yield and berry size over the season, and we also gather our per-week harvest labour costs. This year, we plotted the data.

Ignore the actual numbers of how long it takes us to pick a kg, but notice the trend–it takes nearly twice as long to pick a kg when the berries are 15g as when they are 35g. Also, as you can see, there is a lot of “scatter” in that data….clearly berry size isn’t the only thing that influences picking speed in our data collection plots. 

Ignore the actual numbers of how long it takes us to pick a kg. These aren’t commercial harvest numbers, this is tedious data collection where the harvester teases out which fruit belong to which plant, then counts and weighs each variety plot. Instead, look at the relative times. When berries are 15g each, it takes almost twice as long to pick a kg as when berries are 35g each. 

How about on your operation? Do you know the cost of small berries?