Across Queensland, farmers are battling unseasonable weather. The Bureau of Meteorology is warning of possible crop losses and more extreme weather. A heatwave is bringing the strawberry season in the Far North to an end. Until last week, Atherton strawberry grower Joe Barletta was having a bumper year, doubling his growing capacity and extending his season by using a new raised bed system. While the plants survived, the fruit were spoiled, which he said was a 10-per-cent loss of his crop estimate for the year.
"It’s not just this past week, I’ve lost the next three weeks because the way the crop was looking and the plants were looking, we had strawberries all the way through till the end of November," he said.
"The fruit is not saleable. You could pick it and make jam with it, or put it in gelato, or we could sell it as second-grade strawberries. But economic costs come in, in harvesting it, and what your returns are at that value. It just doesn’t pay.”
Source: abc.net.au