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[lovehd@comcast.net (Hal Love)]

I went to a u-pick strawberry farm a couple of years ago, and they had a good way to deal with the problem of bad fruit. They gave us two buckets, one for the keepers, and one for the rotten fruit. To encourage the pickers to pick as many bad fruits as possible, they would give a discount for each pound of bad fruit picked. Since it was an organic operation, removing the bad fruit was very important for disease control. It worked well and probably saved them quite a bit of labor.

 

Hal

 

 
> I read an analysis of the economics of u-pick farms in NJ several years ago
> and one of the most striking figures was the perecent of fruit (or other
> produce) that's wasted on a u-pick farm. I forget the actual figure, but
> it was more than half. Customers don't want to take anything that isn't
> 'perfect', so they'll leave slightly blemished fruit to rot. If they pick
> something and notice it isn't perfect (under-ripe, over-ripe, blemished,
> whatever) they will drop it. U-pick customers are also sloppy and miss
> some of the 'perfect' fruit until it's over-ripe.