Strawberries
And the hidden economics of experience
My brother-in-law has spent his career in the food production industry in the UK. My family likes to rank his various roles over the years by the desirability of the free product samples he occasionally brings home, and so while we appreciated his time in vegetables and grain, we were rather more grateful for the years he spent in gin. Recently, he did a brief stint in strawberries—which was just fine for us—and it turns out that the economics of strawberry growing are fascinating.
Strawberries are grown in long, metal-framed structures covered in polythene, known as polytunnels, which enable precise control of temperature and humidity. At the farm where my brother-in-law worked, the strawberries aren’t grown at ground level but in bags held in long racks at waist height. This makes the fruit much easier to pick—and, because strawberries have a sneaky habit of hiding beneath their leaves, much quicker to find.
The bags arrive with the young plants already established. Once the bags are hung on the racks, workers insert probes into each one to supply water and nutrients while continuously monitoring the levels of both.
Strawberry growing, then, is a carefully instrumented production system. And that same precision extends to the harvest. The pickers move through the polytunnels selecting the ripe fruit and placing it directly into punnets. The punnets sit in trays, and the trays slot into a wheeled cart. When the trays are full, the picker runs (yes, they run) to a quality-control station at one end of the tunnel. The picker’s individual barcode is scanned; the quality-control worker removes any rotten or misshapen fruit; and the rest is weighed and credited to the picker.
(And you’ll get a real sense of just how meticulously the whole operation has been optimized when I tell you that even the length of the polytunnels has been chosen to balance the economies of scale of longer stretches of plants with the time it takes pickers to run their full trays to the quality-control station at one end.)
The economics of this operation are just as carefully calibrated. There is a productivity threshold for strawberry picking below which the farm makes a loss, and above which it makes a profit. That threshold lies between 35–40 kilograms (77–88 pounds) per picker per hour, depending on the variety of fruit.
But here’s what interested me most about all this. The pickers are seasonal workers—most, in a post-Brexit world, hail from Central Asia—who journey to the UK each year to harvest the strawberry crop. And a first-year picker not only delivers just half the yield of a third-year picker, but also delivers a yield below the threshold required for profitability.
The trick, then, to strawberry farming is never to have anyone pick the fruit for the first time—to do everything to ensure that as many pickers as possible return each year. The farm pays a good rate, but of course that rate is matched by the surrounding farms, and constrained by the economics of the whole operation. So they also invest in high-quality accommodation, good food, and recreational facilities for the workers—in providing the best possible experience they can for their travelling workforce.
Profitable strawberry growing, beneath all the precise calibration and carefully engineered process, is a people problem.
But here’s the question. Is “Never have anyone do the job for the first time” a problem unique to strawberry farming, or instead a problem uniquely known to strawberry farming?
Every complex job has a learning curve. So it’s entirely possible that just as a third-year picker is essential for break-even strawberry productivity, so a third-year scientist is essential for break-even drug development, or a third-year agent is essential for break-even deal-making, or more broadly that there is some number of years after which a person’s contribution to their organization becomes net positive, and that number is bigger than one.
And so perhaps the essential strategy of the strawberry farm—treat people really well—is the essential strategy for any organization where experience matters.
The difference is that the strawberry farm knows the business value of treating people well and the cost of failing to do so, whereas your business might not, in quite the same rigorously quantified way.
But would you want to bet against it?
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership, performance, and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.
This post made me think about the decades-long deterioration in the employer - employee relationship that began roughly in the 1970s. It seems to me that employers started first. They got rid of employees to achieve short-term financial goals. They slashed benefits and eliminated defined benefit retirement plans. And when employees changed their behavior and reduced their loyalty to their company, the leaders of those companies were "shocked." This trend probably peaked pre-covid and the experience during the pandemic seems to have turned things around.