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Orange County Grower Named Head of State's Strawberry Commission

Posted on: Wednesday, 22 February 2006, 21:00 CST

By Jeff Rowe, The Orange County Register, Calif.

Feb. 23--Third-generation Orange County strawberry farmer Mark Murai has been named president of the California Strawberry Commission, which represents about 600 growers, shippers and processors.

Murai has been a board member for 17 years and chair from 2002 to 2004. For the past five months he has been interim president of the Watsonville-based organization. He ascends to the top job at a pivotal time for strawberry farming -- developers are building on choice strawberry land and growers must phase out their use of a reliable pesticide.

Murai says he wants the commission to press ahead with its research efforts on several fronts.

The commission invests about $1 million annually on research to develop berries that will withstand more pests, fend off more soil pathogens and endure wider temperature extremes. The commission also supports nutritional research on the red berries, which Murai calls a "super food." But perhaps the biggest issue facing strawberry growers is the mandated phase-out of methyl bromide, a pesticide widely used to treat strawberry fields before planting but linked to depletion of the earth's ozone layer.

The commission has invested about $10 million in the search for the alternative pest fighters.

The commission also is spending $400,000 this year studying how to contain methyl bromide gas. Typically, plastic covering holds the gas in after application but some escapes.

Murai has been growing strawberries on his family's farms since 1985 while he was an agricultural business management major at Cal Poly Pomona.

"I grew up in the strawberry industry," he said. Strawberries are Orange County's top food crop, generating $51 million for growers in 2004, off 13 percent from the prior year. Figures for last year are not yet available.

Murai, his father and his grandfather all farmed in Irvine but as have many others, he has been forced to look elsewhere for land as builders have absorbed O.C. farmland. Most of the fields the family farms now are in San Bernardino County.

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To see more of The Orange County Register, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.ocregister.com.

Copyright (c) 2006, The Orange County Register, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Orange County Register

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