The Beatles’ idyllic song about “strawberry fields forever,” with “nothing to get hung about,” is certainly not a description of the strawberry fields spread throughout Tangipahoa Parish, where 275 acres are farmed for Louisiana’s state fruit. Here the fields last not forever, but only from late February until mid-May, when crops of cucumber and squash take over. And the strawberry business, far from idyllic, is serious toil for both the pickers and the growers.

At farms like Mendez Produce in Independence, the workday starts soon after dawn–very soon after dawn. The pickers who drive up through the early morning mist and half-hearted April chill are a mixture of migrant workers from Mexico, semi-migrants who use the area as a home base, and locals who live in Independence all year. Most, if not all, are Mexican or Mexican-American. Hispanic music chases away the early morning quiet as the pickers load their basic, but ingenious, one-wheel carts with three empty cardboard flats. One of the carts has been decorated with green, red and white tape, los colores de la bandera mejicana (the colors of the Mexican flag). These three flats will be the first of the forty-to-sixty flats that each worker, such as Antonio Gustillo and Agustin Martinez, will pick per day.

Rows of dewy berry plants await. The ten-inch-high plants grow from slightly raised ground that is covered with miles of black plastic. There are two rows of berries on each raised bit of ground. Beside each pair of rows there is a narrow aisle for the pickers to walk along. Then two more rows. Then walking space. Two more rows. Walking space. More rows. Space. Rows. Each little plant contains all stages of berry growth–delicate white flowers that betoken a berry, small white berries not yet ripe, and the plump, red, luscious ones ready to be picked.

With dazzling rapidity, the workers rifle their hands through the wide leaves that hide the fruit, picking two-handed. Their hands fly as they snap the ripe berries from the thin tendrils from which they hang. A few workers choose to kneel on the damp ground between each two raised, irrigated rows of plants, but most of them bend over to pick the berries, enabling them to move along the rows more quickly. If you are not used to this type of work, it does not take long for your shoulders to ache from leaning over. Imagine leaning down to play a piano that has no legs, for hours. Or imagine leaning over to re-tie your shoes a few hundred times. Everyone sweats. Because of the difficulty of the work, almost all of the pickers are young, mostly men in their late teens or early twenties.

Filled cartons are left beside the plants and carried three at a time to the back of the truck that will transport them from the fields. Before turning in the flats, the pickers rearrange the berries, discarding any that are damaged–maybe by mildew, maybe by birds. They fit the rest of the berries like three-dimensional puzzle pieces to insure each pint is tightly packed and has its top layer of berries pointing tip-upward so that potential buyers can better examine them.

During the strawberry season, many of the pickers at Mendez Produce live in a trailer park about a mile from the fields. It is a little bit of Mexico in the middle of southeast Louisiana. There is an open-air chapel and a makeshift soccer field, as well as signs written in Spanish. The workers often visit the chapel before heading to work to say a prayer for themselves or their distant families. After work, they somehow find the energy for evening soccer games. The games have to be in the evenings because the picking goes on seven days a week; they work every Sunday except Easter. If the sun comes up, it is a workday.

And if the work is toilsome for the berry pickers, it is likewise so for the growers. The ordering of plants, fertilizing the ground, setting up irrigation systems, and the actual planting in October only lead up to a busier time during harvest season. There are animals to contend with. Raccoons and deer and, worst of all, birds, which cannot be scared off by propane sound cannons, sirens resembling hawk cries, or inflated owls–all methods that have been employed unsuccessfully.

The growers must insure that a steady supply of empty cardboard cartoons are delivered to the fields and packed with the green plastic pint cartons that we are all familiar with. A running count of how many flats each worker picks is kept by punching cards, so that each worker receives his correct pay. Then, of course, along with the picking, comes the task of delivering the berries. Diana Mendez makes and receives about 100 phone calls a day on her cell phone while she is supervising the work in the fields. She arranges deliveries of fresh berries to fruit stands, grocery stores and other customers. Berries are for sale the same day that they are picked.

Despite the fact that Ponchatoula calls itself the Strawberry Capital of the World and has its annual Strawberry Festival, many people in southeastern Louisiana are unfamiliar with many aspects of the strawberry harvest. Some are not sure why they are called “straw” berries–straw was used to warm the ground for these early ripening plants before the introduction of black plastic sheeting as a ground cover.

Diana Mendez’s husband was once requested to show his “strawberry trees.” And, many locals are unaware of the 500 or so Mexican migrant workers who come to this area and work so hard, picking up a little English and a lot of berries, and then moving on to harvest other crops, tomatoes and peppers. The strawberry harvest would not be possible without them.

In Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple Picking,” he says that even resting, “overtired,” after the harvest, an apple picker’s “instep arch not only keeps the ache/It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.” Strawberry pickers, when the season ends, no doubt still feel a stiffness in their long-bent backs and still feel the constant brush of strawberry leaves against the backs of their restless hands.

Copyright 2004, M&L Publishing, all rights reserved.