Walking the talk with sustainability

Selecting the best plants is a way that we can showcase sustainability

If you have gone to our website you would have seen the word ‘SUSTAINBLE’ come up. But what does sustainability really mean for us?

Looking across the entire system we strive to use ‘sustainable’ practices at every step of the way, whether this be through creating healthy soils at the beginning to using recyclable packaging at the end. But what other ways do we practice sustainability?

In order to grow fresh produce, such as strawberries it requires a lot of water. Water is a valuable resource which during the strawberry season can be very hard to attain from the sky therefore, it requires us to take a large volume from other water supplies. In our case we take water from an underground bore – therefore tapping into underground water systems.

During our planning process this got us thinking, why don’t we start a selective breeding program for our strawberry plants so that we can use plants that need less water input. Our plants get the best start they possibly can by being planted in a healthy, functioning soil but to get the next generation of stronger, more efficient plants we need to target specific traits. Such a trait is having a plant that can thrive with less water and/or periods of dryness while not compromising overall plant health and berry quality.

For us to achieve this we must place a managed degree of stress, such as lower water volumes, to our plants during the growing season. It is only the plants that perform to a pre-determined level that we will then take runners from for the next season. By doing this it means we will over time, produce strawberry plants that are more efficient by requiring less inputs of valuable, natural resources such as water. Along with this we look for plants that grow big, with leaves that have the largest surface area to be able to capture the most sunlight for photosynthesis. Last of all we look at what plants can also develop the best quality berries (size and quantity) whilst being able to meet the two previous criteria.  

It is through these practices that we at Dairy’s Berries can claim to have sustainability at the forefront of what we do. Keep an eye out for further insights on how we actively practice sustainability in our patch.