Strawberry harvesters near Watsonville, California, pick, grade, and pack only the ripest berries for Driscoll’s, the fourth-generation family-owned fruit company that started in Watsonville, and now grows strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries in twenty countries. The company made its name using traditional plant breeding to develop proprietary varieties of strawberries that it provides to more than a thousand independent growers, and now produces a third of the US berry market, as well as 60 percent of the organic strawberry market. No one has yet developed a machine harvester for the ripe, easily bruised fruit that improves on the human hand and eye, and hiring for “stoop work,” as the backbreaking labor is known, is getting harder. Many strawberry harvesters are paid by the tray, and on this farm in 2016, they were guaranteed at least $10.50 per hour, just about minimum wage in California at the time.
