The air is cool even in July on the Pitre farm in Lac-des-Écorces, near Mont-Laurier. But don’t worry about the hundreds of rows of strawberry plants that fill the fields. The cold is good for this little red fruit, explains Michel Pitre, who runs the family business with his three sons. “The little fruit needs coolness at night and warmth during the day. The contrast is what makes the fruit big and juicy.”
The Pitre family farm has established itself as one of the largest strawberry producers in Quebec in just 8 years of existence. And it alone illustrates both the challenges (climate change, lack of manpower, fierce international competition) that Quebec producers face, but also the solutions available to them. Yes, a box of strawberries is becoming more and more expensive, but farmers can slow this inflation with innovation, says Michel Pitre. “We can’t increase the selling price. We don’t want it to become a luxury product. The only way to improve is to reduce our costs through innovation.”
By producing high volumes while keeping costs down, the Pitre family has managed to carve out a place on the shelves of many supermarkets, including Canada’s Costcos. “Our strategy is to take market share from California berries,” says Michel Pitre. “We don’t want to take the place of producers who sell in local markets, for example.”
Quebec strawberries are well and truly on the heels of their Canadian and American counterparts. Quebec ranks first in terms of strawberry production in Canada, and third in North America after California and Florida.
To achieve this, the Pitres are banking, among other things, on a renewed family farm model. Today’s farms are often “either very small or very large,” emphasizes one of the sons, Jérémie Pitre, for whom the industrial family farm represents the happy medium.
A village within the village
The Pitres’ biggest expense is labor. It’s not hard to believe when you see the dozens of trailers set up at the edge of the strawberry field. This village within a village is home to hundreds of Mexicans, Guatemalans and Jamaicans hired to haul the fruit out of the field.
Their number was around 400 last year and there are now almost 650 workers, according to the Pitre brothers. These figures place the family among the largest employers of temporary workers in Quebec.
“For us, the well-being of workers is extremely important,” emphasizes Michel Pitre. “We want a complex that ensures that our guys are well.”
The duty interviewed a dozen workers in Spanish about their living conditions. And even out of earshot of their bosses, all of them say they live comfortably at Lac-des-Écorces. “I’m fine. Some have different opinions, but I wouldn’t come back if I wasn’t fine,” says one of the first employees, Hector Maroquin.
The hourly wage in Guatemala is equivalent to $3 an hour, workers confirm. An hourly rate of 15 or 16 Canadian dollars seems like a gain to them, despite the long hours of work in the northern fields. There is even a rush at the gate to get a place “in Canada,” assures Julio Cessa, originally from Mexico, who says he waited “two years before having the opportunity to come.”
“It’s not easy. There’s a bit of good, a bit of bad. It’s always like that,” says the man who used to harvest cocoa and avocados.
Grow in pots rather than in soil
Creating a village and filling it with foreign workers is not the end in itself, far from it. To improve production and reduce costs, while protecting against a possible drop in available labor, you also have to rely on technology, explains Jérémie Pitre. A few years ago, his family invented a kind of cart that allows you to pick without having to bend down to the ground, offering a 10% productivity gain. However, this machine is already “out of fashion,” he says bluntly. “Is the future to have guys work squatting, without machines? I don’t believe in that.”
The Pitre farm is gradually adopting a production technique where small fruits are grown in “tunnels,” quasi-greenhouses where the plants are potted and covered with plastic roofs. This helps protect the fruits from the torrential rain that increasingly frequently hits Quebec during the summer months. Preventing damage from climate change is one of the requirements of 21st century agriculture.e century, underlines Jérémie Pitre.
Harvesting is also made easier, since potted plants grow at eye level, not on the ground.
The Pitre family installed several dozen of these quasi-greenhouses last winter. The majority of the farm’s millions of plants should end up under these tunnels within five to seven years, Pitre predicts.
This summer, the Pitres are also testing a way to place a second row of fruit under these tunnels. This combination would not only double production, but also recycle liquid fertilizer and ultimately save money. “We have to innovate,” says Jérémie Pitre.
His father agrees. “The only way to improve is through innovation.” The family invests about $300,000 each year in research and development. The next invention will probably come soon. “After that, we’re aiming for robots!”
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.