The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in

California agriculture, by Miriam Wells

Julie Guthman

To cite this article: Julie Guthman (2016) Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in
California agriculture, by Miriam Wells, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43:3, 756-761, DOI:
10.1080/03066150.2016.1165910

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1165910

Published online: 21 Apr 2016.

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The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2016
Vol. 43, No. 3, 756–761, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1165910

AGRARIAN CLASSICS REVIEW SERIES

Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in California agriculture, by

Miriam Wells
Julie Guthman

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 restric-
tions 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 is owed 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 miles long and never veers more than three 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 fifth 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, Barton, and
Thomas 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

This review forms part of JPS’s ‘Agrarian Classics’ review series, in which leading scholars revisit
classic works in agrarian studies to examine their legacy and contemporary relevance. These
reviews bring older works – both well known and underappreciated – into dialogue with current theor-
etical debates, political struggles, transformations in global capitalism and trajectories of agrarian
change.

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

 The Journal of Peasant Studies 757

took place at a time when the industry was gaining the prominence it enjoys today. Pro-
ductivity rates were climbing significantly and, given technical changes in such areas as
varietal development, strawberries were coming to be the cheap yet quasi-luxurious speci-
alty 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 pro-
duction. 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 USD 18,000 to USD 25,000 per acre. These
days, by all accounts, such outlays are well over USD 50,000 an acre, surpassed only
by raspberries whose production costs exceed USD 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 has most 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 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 emphasis 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 dis-
ciplinary mechanism, however, has been a politically constructed farm labor market that
has created a constant labor surplus of undocumented workers whose vulnerability to immi-
nent 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, constitute 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, manage-
ment 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 conten-
tious 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 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 econ-
omies of scale, as growers need to constantly test new techniques and varietals and monitor
758 Julie Guthman

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 market-
ing 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 fore-
most, 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 USD 50,000. As for buyers, the industry is cur-
rently dominated by five large corporate buyers (one a former cooperative), and the remain-
ing cooperative and 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 discov-
ered 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 Straw-
berry 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 straw-
berry industry has become accustomed. Of course, like surplus, this shortage has been
shaped politically by the institutions and ideologies that have made strawberry-picking suit-
able 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
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 759

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 (Guthman, in press).
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, 2015a, 2015b).
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 pro-
ductivity the industry has experienced. One could argue that this topic was epiphenomenal
to Wells’ object of study. Yet, in my read, 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 avail-
able 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 abandon-
ment of orthodox Marxism, the re-emergence of peasant studies, and a burgeoning scho-
larly 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 her book and elsewhere: 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 straw-
berry industry’s return to sharecropping in the late 1960s through the 1970s, after it had
largely gone away. By sharecropping she meant a system in which strawberry growers sub-
divided 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
760 Julie Guthman

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 per-
formance, 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 owner-growers 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 chal-
lenged. Namely, some grower-shippers and other intermediaries began to go into ‘partner-
ships’ with low-resource growers (many former 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 straw-
berry 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 sharecrop-
ping 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 techno-
logical 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 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 stu-
dents 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
 The Journal of Peasant Studies 761

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.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
New research reported herein was funded by the National Science Foundation, grant
#1262064.

References
Burawoy, M. 1985. The politics of production. London: Verso Press.
Friedland, W., A. Barton, and R. Thomas. 1981. Manufacturing green gold. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Goodman, D. and M. Watts. 1994. Reconfiguring the rural or fording the divide?: Capitalist restruc-
turing and the global agro-food system. Journal of Peasant Studies 22, no. 1: 1–49.
Guthman, J. In press. Paradoxes of the border: Labor shortages and farmworker minor agency in
reworking California's strawberry fields. Economic Geography.
Guthman, J. and S. Brown. 2015a. Midas’ not-so-golden touch: On the demise of methyl iodide
as a soil fumigant in California. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, on-line first.
doi: 10.1080/1523908X.2015.1077441.
Guthman, J. and S. Brown. 2015b. Whose life counts: Biopolitics and the ‘bright line’ of chloropicrin
mitigation in California’s strawberry industry. Science, Technology and Human Values, on-line
first. doi: 10.1177/0162243915606804.
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.
Wells, M. 1996. Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in California agriculture. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.

Julie Guthman is a geographer and professor of social sciences at the University of California at
Santa Cruz where she teaches courses in global political economy and the politics of food and agri-
culture. Her publications include two multi-award winning books: Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of
Organic Farming in California and Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism.
Email: jguthman@ucsc.edu