India wants to join the strawberry superpowers

In the west of India, the mountainous region of Mahabaleshwar is home to most of India's strawberry farms.

Around 85% of India's strawberry cultivation happens there.

An altitude of more than 1,000m (3,280ft) gifts the region a long cool growing season between November and March.

In addition, light, well-drained soil is well-suited to strawberry cultivation.

But that doesn't mean farmers have an easy life - it's a labour intensive and risky way to make a living.

"If you have a field full of strawberries and sudden heavy rains hit, the entire crop is ruined and we have to bear massive losses," says Sheetal Danavle who, with her husband, grows strawberries on half of their three-acre farm.

Strawberry plants have to be replaced every season and are not grown from seed. Instead, farmers buy young plants from suppliers. For Danavle, on her small farm, that's an outlay of $2,500 (£1,900) every year.

"If the season goes well, you can earn double your investment. But the climate makes it a huge gamble," she says.

Thousands of farmers grow strawberries across the Mahabaleshwar region, making the fruit one of the most profitable horticultural crops in western India.

Despite that success the industry still relies on varieties that are imported from California, Florida, Italy and Spain, as no one in India has developed a domestic plant.

It can take 10 to 15 years for breeders in the US and Europe to develop a top quality fruit and they patent their varieties.

"We import the certified mother plant from the breeder abroad," says Nelson Sequeira, the founder and director of Tara Farms Fresh, a licensed strawberry propagator.

Once imported the plants have to go through a government quarantine, before they are planted in a nursery. There the mother plant produces daughter plants and those are then sold to farmers.

"One single imported mother plant becomes an engine. That single mother plant will shoot out runners to yield an average of 20 daughter plants - with some advanced growers pushing that up to 30 or 40," says Sequeira.

It's a high-tech and precision operation.

"The plants do not touch the ground. We use large industrial pipes split completely in half to form long, rounded gutter containers," Sequeira explains.

"Instead of soil, we pack these containers with a specialized coco-peat substrate derived entirely from coconut husk. We then integrate a highly precise drip-irrigation and fogging system to control micro-climates."

Sequeira and other propagators rely on mother plants from abroad - for now.

But work at Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth (MPKV), an agricultural university in Maharashtra, might change that.

MPKV has partnered with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) on a breeding experiment.

Researchers are using controlled, low-dose gamma irradiation on plant tissues to induce stable genetic mutations.

"The goal is to fast-track the development of India's first indigenous, climate-resilient strawberry cultivar that matches the large fruit size and firm texture of foreign varieties while natively tolerating Indian heatwaves," says Dr Darshan Shashank Kadam, assistant professor of Horticulture at MPKV.

He admits it could be a long process, with results perhaps in 10 or 15 years. But in the near term they are helping farmers in other ways.

"We are developing scientific packages of practices for farmers. We have already standardised planting schedules, fertiliser recommendations and growth regulator applications specifically for Mahabaleshwar conditions," he says.

Large farms with more resources are investing in new technology.

Ketan Yashwant Sodha, is the founder and CEO of Berry Fresh Agrotech. He started with traditional open-field farming, but was frustrated by losses caused by the weather.

"For the past 10 years, it has consistently rained in India during our peak season - November, December, and the first week of January. When you are in an open field and your plantation is at its absolute peak, a single rain will ruin your entire crop," he says.

So in 2022, he started to experiment with hydroponics, a type of covered cultivation that does not use soil and tightly controls water, nutrients, light, and temperature.

His early results were not encouraging.

"I suffered immense losses and failed multiple times," Sodha says.

"The soil is forgiving; hydroponics does not forgive. If you make a mistake today, you will wake up tomorrow morning to a disaster - and the recovery time in hydroponics takes twice as long as soil."

But the lessons learned from those mistakes are paying off.

"We have trailed 19 different varieties, including rare Japanese ones, and we are the only ones in India trailing a specific Netherlands variety this season."

Sodha says that limiting each plant to 750ml of water a day produces "rich, highly concentrated sugars and aromas instead of water-logged, bland fruits".

His team also runs what he calls regular "blood work" on the crops, which involves laboratory testing of the leaves and petioles (the stalks attaching leaves to the stems) to measure exact nutrient uptake. That way he knows exactly which nutrients and chemicals need to go into the water supply.

And by using a semi-open polyhouse, strawberries can grow the whole year round. "It's not a seasonal fruit for us," Sodha says.

Now he is ready to scale-up.

"We have built the trial facility, written the SOPs (standard operating procedures), and designed the farm manual. We are talking to investors to expand to a five-acre facility that will accommodate 200,000 plants."

Krishan Bhilare's family has been farming strawberries for generations in Mahabaleshwar.

He can remember when the first American varieties were planted in 1992 and being amazed at the size of the fruit.

Bhilare is part of a Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO) network. They have installed towers at four strategic locations across their land. The towers monitor weather conditions.

The system employs AI, which uses the weather data to pinpoint when rain will strike. Farmers can then be advised to delay spraying their crops, so expensive chemicals are not just washed away.

The FPO is also building vertical towers, where strawberries can be grown on a coco-peat substrate, five layers deep.

"By stacking five pots into a single vertical tower, we can scale our density from 25,000 plants to 125,000 plants per acre. We are effectively multiplying our production footprint by five times on the exact same piece of land," says Bhilare.

But such investments are either beyond small farms, or a huge risk.

In 2017, Danavle and her husband experimented with hydroponic strawberry farming.

"The experiment was 100% successful and the fruits we grew were entirely organic. It saved us a lot of labour, the workers didn't have to constantly bend down or prune, and it saved us a lot of money on medicines and field manure."

But they were unlucky - a massive cyclone hit Mahabaleshwar that year.

"The cyclone completely knocked down our entire hydroponic setup. Then we did not have the courage to set it up again."

So, Sheetal went back to the traditional method of growing strawberries, but with a twist.

"I took help of social media. I post videos of how one can grow strawberries and invite tourists to visit my strawberry farm, learn and pick the fruit. They directly now buy from the farm. This has helped, cut the middle man, and make more profit. So, now I am an influencer and entrepreneur."