Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in California agriculture, by Miriam Wells,
Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1996, xxv + 340 pp., ISBN 0-8014-8279-8
When I was approached by the editors of JPS to write a retrospective review of a ‘modern
classic’ in agrarian studies, Strawberry Fields was the obvious choice. Few books were as
influential on my earlier work on organics or as relevant for my current research as this one. I
write this review enmeshed in a large research project about how new regulatory restrictions on
the use of soil fumigants, aimed at environmental health, are affecting California’s strawberry
industry. In conducting this research, I have traveled and interviewed strawberry growers and
others in the very region that is the focus of Miriam Wells’ study: the central coast. So I re-read
the book with a quite tangible familiarity and an instrumental desire to pay close attention to the
empirical details, to assess what has changed and what has stayed the same in the industry. Yet, I
write this review equally motivated to encourage others less ensconced in the region and the
industry to take up this book. It is a model commodity study, rich in empirical detail, and explicit
in its theoretical arguments. The degree to which some of its insights now seem indisputable
owes in part to Wells who, through this book, put some old and weak ideas about agrarian
change to rest. At the same time, the book also germinated ideas that are far from closed, and
arguably served as a precursor to scholarship on socio-natural assemblages. Those who are
interested in how non-human objects shape human activity would do well to return to Wells and
her discussion of the characteristics of the strawberry and their effects on work processes.
To situate the book, Strawberry Fields is first and foremost a finely grained ethnography
of California’s strawberry industry in a fairly circumscribed geography. The central coast
strawberry producing region, as delimited by Wells, exists in an area that is no more than 30
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miles long and never veers more than 3 miles from the Pacific Ocean. The size of the region
under study belies its significance for understanding agrarian dynamics. As of 2014,
strawberries were the 5th highest grossing crop in California – itself one of the highest value
agricultural regions in the world. They were the top agricultural commodities in two of the
counties under study, surpassing the ‘green gold’ (Friedland et al., 1981) of lettuce in Monterey
County, the ‘salad bowl of the nation.’ Wells’ research spanned a period that began in 1976 and
ended in the early 1990s, and thus took place at a time when the industry was gaining the
prominence it enjoys today. Productivity rates were climbing significantly and, given technical
changes in such areas as varietal development, strawberries were coming to be the cheap yet
quasi-luxurious specialty crop that consumers could expect to see in the supermarket year round.
For Wells, though, the significance of the crop lies with the centrality of labor in its
production. Here it is important to understand that strawberries are a high revenue crop because
they produce a great deal of fruit per acre, especially in the central coast where the harvest
season takes place over nine months of the year. Of course, revenues also have to cover the
inordinately high costs of producing strawberries. When Wells conducted her research,
strawberry production required outlays of $18,000 to $25,000 per acre. These days, by all
accounts, such outlays are well over $50,000 an acre, surpassed only by raspberries whose
production costs exceed $70,000 an acre, so I am told. As Wells’ details, some of these high
costs are related to land preparation, including fumigation. Yet, what most has driven the costs of
producing strawberries is the cost of harvest labor – labor that cannot be mechanized because of
the delicateness of the berry. Indeed, the need for harvest labor has risen in direct relation to the
reduction of labor costs in other areas of the production process, owing in large part to the use of
a range of agro-chemicals that have contributed to overall productivity. Because many of these
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other costs are relatively fixed, controlling the cost of harvest labor is the fulcrum of
profitability, according to Wells. At the same time, strawberry picking requires great care and
knowledge about which berries to toss because they are bruised, moldy, or undersized and how
to place them in a basket to be attractive to consumers at the grocery story. Wells thus gave
great emphases to the processes by which growers keep their harvest costs down while ensuring
the necessary care. These have included paying workers largely on piece rates (which workers
themselves prefer), close supervision of the actual harvest, and forms of labor recruitment that
make use of interpersonal relations among workers and between workers and employers. The
key disciplinary mechanism, however, has been a politically constructed farm labor market that
has created a constant labor surplus of undocumented workers whose vulnerability to imminent
firing or deportation has kept them relatively docile and cooperative.
Still, one of Wells’ aims was to demonstrate the variations in labor control, related to the
particularities of place. The central coast region is dominated by two river valleys, the Pajaro and
Salinas, both of which drain into the Monterey Bay, about 75 miles south of San Francisco.
These two large valleys, along with an in-between area of small valleys and hamlets that she
dubbed the Monterey Hills, constituted three micro-regions that Wells found worthy of
juxtaposition. She shows how each has had distinct clusters of grower ethnicity, farm size,
access to capital and knowledge, work organization, management style, histories of resistance,
and so forth. For instance, the more industrial and large scale Salinas Valley micro-region,
where white growers have dominated, has been more influenced by farmworker organizing and
thus has seen higher wages, albeit more contentious labor relations, while the more marginal and
small scale Monterey Hills micro-region, where Mexican-origin growers have dominated, has
been typified by lower wages and paternalistic labor relations. Meanwhile, the Pajaro Valley
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region has been dominated by Japanese-origin growers, farming on mid-size ranches, who have
been most attuned to the technical details of farming and their own capital investments, and thus
have offered more accommodating labor relations.
Wells also gave significant attention to industry structure. In terms of farm structure,
Wells noted that berry farms were relatively small, even in the Salinas area where they rarely
exceeded 100 acres. According to her, strawberry production has no particular economies of
scale, as growers need to constantly test new techniques and varietals and monitor their fields
and plants for any problems. Plus, high per acre profits make large farms unnecessary. She also
wrote of an array of marketing arrangements. These ranged from large buyer-shippers, some of
which financed and advised their growers, to grower marketing cooperatives (two major ones at
the time), to a number of independent shippers. As she noted, most of these buyers purchased
their berries by the box, reluctant to enter into arrangements where they take crop risk, but at the
same time they imposed significant quality controls on growers. Yet even these relationships
were differentiated by region, with the white growers working with the large grower shippers,
the Japanese growers working with the cooperatives, and the Mexican growers working with the
independent shippers that would accept inferior quality fruit.
Since Strawberry Fields was published, many of the empirical conditions of the industry
have changed, and changed in ways that bear on some of Wells’ arguments. First and foremost,
there has been a good deal of consolidation across the industry. Although ranch sizes are still
delimited by available acreage, many growers now operate on multiple ranches, in multiple
regions, and a significant number farm more than 500 acres per year, a huge capital undertaking
given the per acre cost of over $50,000. As for buyers, the industry is currently dominated by
five large corporate buyers (one a former cooperative), and the remaining cooperative and
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independent grower-shippers are on the decline. At the same time there has been a substantial
uptick in direct marketing, driven by the organic and farmers’ market booms. As one
consequence of all of this consolidation, the distinctions between Wells’ micro-regions are far
less clear. In addition, Latinos have become a more dominant grower group throughout the
region, particularly as many Japanese-origin growers have retired and have borne children who
have chosen other professions. Once marginal Mexican-origin growers now work closely with
the main grower-shippers, or have discovered new opportunities in direct marketing, making
farms of 4-6 acres quite viable and even profitable.
The flipside of this consolidation has been much more volatility in the industry. Wells
wrote at a time in which, as she put it, profits were exceptionally stable in the central coast
strawberry industry, despite wider instabilities in agricultural production and even the economy
writ large. She told that few established growers ever went bankrupt. Today, growers are on
much less solid ground, and many suggest that the industry is in a state of crisis given the
challenges it currently faces. Besides drought and high land values – note that strawberries
compete with suburbs for the natural air conditioning of the Pacific Ocean – growers also face a
major labor shortage and increasing regulation of soil fumigants. These two challenges are
particularly significant, the first for how it flips on its head one of Wells’ key contentions and the
other for its virtual omission from Strawberry Fields.
While Wells turned much of her argument on labor surpluses, today central coast growers
most lament severe labor shortages. These labor shortages stem from the relatively recent
militarization of the US-Mexico border, making it more costly and dangerous for people to cross,
which has curtailed the constant influx of young bodies to which the strawberry industry has
become accustomed. Of course, like surplus, this shortage has been shaped politically by the
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institutions and ideologies that have made strawberry-picking suitable for Mexicans and not
whites and kept the ‘prevailing wage’ out of sync with labor demand (Mitchell, 2012). Still,
many growers complain of worker disloyalty (in an industry which as Wells noted has depended
on patronage and familial relations) and tell stories of prospective workers driving through their
fields to assess the yield of the plants and the overall working conditions. They also report on
years in which they have not harvested 10 to 50 acres for the lack of workers. Few growers even
bother with harvesting berries for the processing market since the return is not worth the labor
costs. As such, many growers have been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy, and each year
dozens of growers leave strawberries altogether. Of those that remain, many make planting
decisions and create field conditions that make it easy for workers to move quickly through the
fields to earn high piece rates. Some even justify the use of fumigants, which are otherwise
harmful to workers who toil in nearby fields, because the fumigants help produce robust plants
that allow harvest workers to earn more money.
On that note, since Strawberry Fields was published, soil fumigant regulation has become
the albatross of the industry. The industry’s favored fumigant, methyl bromide, is reaching the
final moments of its phase out as an ozone-depleting chemical, methyl iodide, designed to
replace it, met enormous public resistance and has since been withdrawn from the market, and
the remaining fumigants face tighter restrictions in the form of buffer zones and other expensive
application protocols (see Guthman and Brown in press, 2015 on-line first). Oddly, though,
Wells gave scant attention to the industry’s critical dependence on soil fumigants and extremely
high use of other pesticides, other than noting that soil fumigation is an important element of
land preparation and the basis of the huge increase in productivity the industry has experienced.
One could argue that this topic was epiphenomenal to Wells’ object of study. Yet, in my read,
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fumigation is in many ways inseparable from the labor question, first because fumigants have
received increased scrutiny precisely because they are toxic to workers, as well as nearby
residents, and second, and less obviously, because fumigation regimes are intertwined with labor
practices. For instance, growers decide how to fumigate their fields in part in consideration of
when workers will be available for harvest. And again, they defend the continued use of
fumigants because these chemicals ensure the hearty, high-yielding plants that are a factor in
attracting workers during a labor shortage.
That Strawberry Fields provides such empirical fodder is one of its great strengths. Still,
Wells set out to write this book not only to be the great empirical endeavor that it is. She wrote
the book at a critical scholarly juncture, one that involved the widespread abandonment of
orthodox Marxism, the re-emergence of peasant studies, and a burgeoning scholarly interest in
the restructuring of agro-food systems. Indeed the late 1980s through mid-1990s saw a
wellspring of new books in agro-food studies that debated questions on the industrialization and
globalization of agro-food systems, shaped by new considerations of the role of nature in
agricultural exceptionalism. Evidently, she wanted to weigh in on a number of theoretical
developments that were preoccupying scholars during this period, developments with which I am
quite familiar since these were the stuff of my graduate school training.
One was to contest notions of linearity and inevitability in trajectories of capitalist
development, especially as they relate to agriculture. Here rediscoveries of Kautsky’s (1988)
agrarian question figured large in hers and other books: industrialization was not proceeding
apace in agriculture, defying Marxian historical teleology, and many were seeking to understand
or show this. For Wells, the defining moment was the strawberry industry’s return to
sharecropping in the late 1960s through the 70s, after it had largely gone away. By sharecropping
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she meant a system in which strawberry growers subdivided their land into 3-5 acre plots and
leased them out to croppers rather than employing workers directly. The embrace of this
‘feudal’-like organization of production made no sense in theories of development that predicted
the inexorable withering away of such ‘pre-capitalist’ modes of development. Working through
several possible explanations of this return, she concluded that sharecropping reemerged as a
response to changes in the labor market, precipitated by, among other things, the expansion of
labor-protective laws and the growing presence of the United Farm Workers’ union.
Sharecropping conferred specific advantages for owners while still allowing them to keep control
over the production process and ensure quality. These advantages included increased motivation
for labor performance, delayed payment for labor, and reduced labor costs because sharecroppers
would exploit unpaid family labor. Her broader point here was that on-the-ground politics could
alter capitalist trajectories.
A second theoretical contribution was to build on Burawoy’s (1985) observations that
class politics can often take place in realms outside the shop floor. Here she specifically wanted
to emphasize the legal realm as a site where class categories, as well as exploitation more
generally, would be contested. Her specific example was legal contestation over sharecropping
arrangements. While some of the croppers liked them, for others it became clear that the ownergrowers were exerting far too much control over production practices and sharecroppers were
not really independent farms after all, but more akin to wage laborers. A lawsuit against one of
the most prominent grower-shippers brought this to light and forced a reworking and often an
abandonment of this practice. Interestingly, sharecropping did not entirely go away, but assumed
a different form less likely to be challenged. Namely, some grower-shippers and other
intermediaries began to go into ‘partnerships’ with low-resource growers (many former
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farmworkers or ranch managers, virtually all Latino) by providing financing and market access,
but, as Wells saw happening, rarely informing these new growers of the risks involved. With the
current volatility of the strawberry industry, these are the growers who are most likely to go out
of business, often saddled with a great deal of debt, but, unfortunately, they are easily replaced
by others who imagine better futures for themselves in managing their own businesses.
A third theoretical contribution was to weigh in on salutary claims of the day about
industrial divides and a move to flexible specialization in organizing production. Regime theory
was in its heyday, and some scholars, using contract farming as an example, were suggesting that
agricultural work, like industry, had become ‘post-Fordist,’ more flexible and less Taylorist, and
hence less alienating. Like others writing at the time, notably Goodman and Watts (1994), Wells
rejected this characterization, loath to treat sharecropping or contracting arrangements as any less
exploitative.
Looking back at Wells’ contributions to these debates, I must admit that I find some of
her claims rather obvious, even tired. At the same time, I recognize that this book helped put
them to rest, and that alone is to be commended. Nevertheless, to me her more enduring
theoretical contribution has been to show how the characteristics of the commodity – here the
strawberry – has shaped work itself. While some of these characteristics have been bred by
humans into the berry, including the ability to produce fruit over a long season, Wells
nevertheless effectively showed how non-human nature strongly shaped the strawberry industry.
Given how the mode of production that ensued from both technological innovation and a
favorable climate – miles of mono-cropped production – also made the strawberry plant more
vulnerable to soil pathogens, to which fumigants are a fix, today we might deepen her analysis,
and treat central coast strawberry production as a complex socio-natural assemblage. Yet we
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would need to recognize that Wells laid the groundwork for such an analysis.
For those readers interested in learning a great deal about strawberry production on the
central coast, there is no greater resource. For those who want to teach undergraduate students
about California farm labor issues, I hold that this book still provides the best short overview
currently available of the changing political context for agricultural workers, although it is in
need of updating. For those who want to show their graduate students how research should be
done, the research in this book is phenomenal, unrivaled in its attention to detail, and includes
several appendices describing her methods and sources of data. And for those who are interested
in all things food related, as many people are these days, this book is an exemplar of a
commodity study, shorn of feel-good fluff and attendant to the real life politics of how food is
produced. It is indeed a classic.
References
Burawoy, M. 1985. The politics of production. London: Verso Press.
Friedland, W. H., A. E. Barton and R. J. Thomas 1981. Manufacturing green gold. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Goodman, D. and M. Watts. 1994. Reconfiguring the rural or fording the divide. Journal of
Peasant Studies 221 (1): 1-49.
Guthman, J. and S. Brown. 2015 on line first. Midas’ not-so-golden touch: on the demise of
methyl iodide as a soil fumigant in California. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning.
doi: 10.1080/1523908X.2015.1077441.
Guthman, J. and S. Brown. in press.Whose life counts: biopolitics and the ‘bright line’ of
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chloropicrin mitigation in California’s strawberry industry. Science, Technology and Human
Values.
Kautsky, K. 1988. The agrarian question. London: Zwan Press.
Mitchell, D. 2012. ‘They saved the crops: Labor, landscape, and the struggle over industrial
farming in bracero-era california. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Julie Guthman
Division of Social Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz
jguthman@ucsc.edu
© 2015 Julie Guthman
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