Along Holohan Road in Watsonville, the strawberry fields look much like they always do: flat, green and pressed close to roads, houses and one another. Beginning in September, five berry fields will become a test site for a less familiar piece of farm equipment—the high-temperature steam system.
Santa Cruz County is putting state money behind a pilot that will cover about 25 acres in the Pajaro Valley, where strawberries are the main crop affected. The county's agricultural officials are testing steam as a chemical-free alternative to soil fumigation, a practice that has long sat at the uneasy intersection of crop production and public health. The county's trial is scheduled to begin in September.
A Different Kind of Soil Treatment
The project carries a $175,000 state-funded budget. Its purpose is practical rather than ornamental: find out whether steam can do enough of the fumigation job to fit into coastal berry production while reducing pesticide exposure for agricultural workers and the communities surrounding the fields.
That question is especially local in the Pajaro Valley, where agricultural parcels run alongside homes and public roads. A treatment that substitutes heat for chemicals would change the exposure calculation, but it would also have to work within the narrow timing and labor choreography of strawberry production. The pilot is meant to put that proposition on actual ground rather than leave it in a greenhouse or research plot.
The test arrives as California is tightening its scrutiny of older pesticide tools. The Department of Pesticide Regulation recently announced that manufacturers were voluntarily canceling paraquat-dichloride registrations in the state, citing health concerns associated with exposure. Paraquat is being phased out in California, though that decision concerns a different pesticide and does not determine whether steam will be suitable for strawberry soil.
The Hard Part Comes After the Demonstration
Steam sounds simple until it meets a commercial field. The county will have to learn how consistently the treatment performs across the five sites, how it fits growers' schedules and what the method demands in equipment, fuel, labor and time. Those are not side questions in strawberries; they are the difference between a promising demonstration and a usable production practice.
The results will also land in a regulatory climate that is already moving toward more accountability for health violations and repeat offenders. California's proposed pesticide updates would be the state's first significant changes to those rules since 2006, according to the Sacramento Bee's account of the proposal.
For now, the county is not declaring chemical fumigation obsolete, and the pilot does not promise that steam will transfer neatly to every coastal crop or soil type. It is a field-scale test of whether reducing one category of risk can be done without handing growers a new set of production problems.