More Florida farmers adding blackberries to their fields

PLANT CITY, Fla. - It’s blackberry season, and a Hillsborough County strawberry grower said he’s among the central Florida farmers adding blackberries to their crops with the help of University of Florida agriculture researchers.

Blackberries are a new crop for Matt Parke. Now in their second blackberry growing season at Parkesdale Farms in Dover and Plant City, Parke said there was definitely a learning curve.

"Last year, I was kind of scratching my head thinking I made a big mistake. This is a big investment. I was like we might have made a mistake," said Parke. "This year how everything happened, what the crop looks like, we’re going to do really well with it."

The fruit needs a lot of cold days, so Parke said he had to learn some tricks with spraying.

"It triggers it into thinking it’s been through a winter. And now it’s spring, let me open up and every bud that breaks is going to be like five or six berries on it," said Parke.

Researchers with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences are working to figure out which kinds of blackberries grow best in the Tampa Bay area. UF/IFAS’s Zhanao Deng, a plant breeder and professor at Gulf Coast Research and Education Center in Wimauma, said they are looking at a couple of blackberry varieties for central Florida, developing new varieties, pest control and other technologies to help farmers.

READ: Celebrating the strawberry: Parkesdale Farm Market strawberry shortcake

"They will be born here. They will be evaluated and selected for Florida growers here," said Deng.

He said they're working with more citrus and strawberry growers.

"They face a lot of challenges and competition from other countries, so they are interested in diversifying their crops," said Deng.

Parkesdale Farms has some rows of UF’s blackberry breeds, and it could become more common.

"I think it could be an emerging crop. There’s still some work that has to be done with it to fine tune the process for central Florida," said Parke.

After the rise and fall of other fruit crops in Florida, blackberries show signs of a steadier future.

READ: How Plant City's ‘Strawberry Sue’ became a champion for Florida’s strawberry industry

"The blueberry market has totally crashed. Peru has flooded our market with the way they’re producing them year-round. You know, there used to be a lot of blueberry farms around here, but that’s all declined," said Parke. "This is not over saturated yet. This commodity is not over saturated, and I want to capitalize on it while I can."

Parke said the agriculture industry is always changing, and blackberries could make central Florida’s future in agriculture even sweeter.

"You always gotta be looking forward and trying to evolve with the industry, and I think this is one way that we can evolve moving forward," said Parke.

Parke said Parkesdale Farms fills about 4,000 to 5,000 boxes a week, and up to 15,000 boxes a week of blackberries during peak season. Parke said they currently ship blackberries to Canada, but they will look into adding Publix and Walmart into the mix.

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