IRVINE, Calif. – Strawberry farms are a staple of Orange County. But a higher minimum wage is making it difficult for these farms to stay in business and compete with countries like Mexico.

For nearly 100 years, Manassero has been one of the most recognizable names in farming in Orange County. Anne Manassero is the Vice President of Manassero Farms in Irvine. Most of her work these days focuses on business, entertaining, and events rather than agriculture.

“My husband and I often say we do more paperwork than farming,” says Anne Manassero.

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Anne’s husband Dan is a third generation farmer, and since the 1950s the Manasseros have specialized in strawberries. But Orange County, once one of the country’s richest agricultural landscapes, has changed dramatically.

According to the Division of Land Resource Protection Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program, between 1984 and 2016, Orange, Los Angeles, and Ventura Counties lost nearly 70,000 acres of what’s considered “important farmland.”

“It becomes harder and harder to farm. A lot of the smaller farms have gone out of business because there’s nowhere left to farm. There’s so much building going on,” says Manassero.

Strawberries in particular were once a booming crop in O.C. But in just the last decade, strawberry acreage in the county itself has plummeted 95 percent, from 8,000 to just 400 acres. The Manasseros have personally lost nearly 85 percent of their crop. The 65 acres they once picked from are down to 10.

They have been forced to cut back on their acreage because they simply can’t afford to stay in business and pay the number of employees they need to pick the strawberries.

“For instance for us, we pay $2.50 per hour per employee just for worker’s comp, on top of that $13 an hour minimum wage. And that’s not even counting all of the other unemployment taxes and everything that goes with that. So I think people have to ask themselves, ‘How much can a business afford to absorb and lose before they go out of business,’” said Manaserro.

The minimum wage in California is currently $13/hour, which is set to increase $1 per year until it’s $15/hour in 2023.

A lot of the landscape has changed because of where we’re getting our produce. According to a 2017 research paper from the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, citing the Foreign Agricultural Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, “... imported strawberries from Mexico account for about 95 percent of total imported strawberries in the U.S.”

States like California and Florida are struggling to stay ahead of Mexico as labor costs mount domestically.

“Strawberries have to be picked by hand. There isn’t any kind of automated thing that can pick a strawberry for you. So it’s absolutely a labor intensive fruit. So when stores bring in all of the strawberries from Mexico, how is a business supposed to compete with that when we’re having to pay such a high minimum wage,” says Manassero.

Today, the Manasseros can only retain 13 employees of the 100 they had previously. They will likely be the last generation to run their farm.

“It is heartbreaking, and I know that for us, my husband’s family has been doing this for going 100 years. And my husband’s going to be the last one. He’s the last one of his brothers that are still farming. And once we retire, that’s going to be it. There’s not going to be any more Manassero Farms around. So it’s kind of a shame. It breaks my heart,” Manassero says.

The local landscape changing.