Louisiana is celebrating the strawberry this weekend with a festival expected to draw thousands, but underpinning the revelry is the sad reality that the state's small but cherished strawberry farms are disappearing.

Associated Press

Organizers of the annual strawberry festival in Ponchatoula, a town of 5,200 residents about 50 miles northwest of New Orleans, were expecting 250,000 people to attend the event, which began Friday and ends Sunday.

Festival-goers not only get to indulge in Louisiana strawberries, which locals say are the sweetest around, they also get to sample cuisine unique to the state, like fried alligator and crawfish gumbo, festival chairwoman Amy Harris said.

The event is popular with the thousands who attend each year -- this year is its 36th -- and it is important to the state's strawberry farmers, who are feeling increasingly squeezed by rising land costs and low-priced imports from out of state.

"It's changing a way of life, something we always pride ourselves on, but I don't know what we can do to stop it," said Regina Bracy, the research coordinator at the Louisiana State University AgCenter's Hammond Research Station. "I guess people can support Louisiana produce and Louisiana strawberries."

A decade ago, there were about 100 strawberry farmers in Tangipahoa Parish, the heart of Louisiana's strawberry industry, she said; now there about half that number. There were 85 strawberry farmers statewide last year, according to the LSU AgCenter.

Retirements are responsible for some of the decline. With ever-tighter profit margins for Louisiana strawberry farmers, fewer young people are willing to take on the job.

Land prices in the Tangipahoa Parish spiked in the year after Hurricane Katrina hit the region in August 2005, a parish assessor said.

William Fletcher, 38, said he wouldn't have been able to leave his banking job to take over his grandfather's farm if the land hadn't been in his family.

Fletcher, who grows vegetables and other fruits during the offseason, said competition from major growing states like California and Florida makes it difficult for Louisiana's small strawberry farmers to get their product on the shelves at large grocery chains because the larger growers can sell at a lower price.

Instead, Fletcher said, he sells his berries to roadside peddlers, farmers' markets and locally owned groceries.

"You'd make more watching TV, you know what I mean?" he said.

While the strawberry festival doesn't make or break a year, Fletcher said he would be at this year's, selling to folks who look forward to the height of berry-growing season and talking to old-timers who remember working fields of their own.

"It makes you proud," he said. "You get to do something a lot of people don't get to do."

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)