![]() ![]() Tangipahoa Parish, where Ponchatoula is located, was the state’s lead strawberry producing parish with $19.3 million in sales. The lure of a steady income without the backbreaking work of farm life led to dwindling acres of strawberry plants, a trend that would sweep the entire state.Ĭompared to the strawberry boom of 80 years ago, in 2014 there were only 81 Louisiana strawberry growers producing strawberries on 367 acres, according to the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center. ![]() By 1931-which some locals say was the peak of strawberry farming in Ponchatoula- Louisiana boasted 23,500 acres of strawberry farms.īut end the of World War II also brought the beginning of the end of farming as a way of life for many of Ponchatoula’s young men who had become enticed by better-paying industrial jobs. As new technology allowed for refrigerated railcars so strawberry harvests could be transported farther away by train, there was a boom of strawberry farmers in Louisiana. In the early 20th century, Ponchatoula was one strawberry field after another. ![]() Mixon’s small clapboard house sits directly alongside the famed Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival, held once a year to pay homage not only to those sweet strawberries at the height of the harvest, but also to the heyday of strawberry farming in Louisiana. Mixon and the other Ponchatoula children used to attend school from July to March, enduring sweltering Louisiana summers in a classroom so that they would be let out in time to help the town’s farmers pick, stem and package that year’s strawberry harvest. She should know-the 82-year-old Ponchatoula native grew up in the shadow of the strawberry farming industry. “Louisiana has the best berries,” Anna Mae Mixon proudly boasted. The deep red berries have a certain hold over the folks in this small, southeastern Louisiana town, which once saw one of its mayors go head-to-head with local authorities over the right to claim his town as the “Strawberry Capital of the World.” Ponchatoula strawberries are the stuff of local legend. ![]()
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