Back in August 2023, I wrote a blog post titled “Why don’t we grow strawberries from seed.” This blog post became way more popular that I expected (over 58,000 views as of 11 March 2025). One potential reason is this week’s announcement about Ohala’s strawberry consortium to market strawberries as true seed.

So, I re-read my earlier post and think it deserves another perspective. Our current system of producing daughter plants under field conditions is a very long process but one that we’ve become very efficient at. It starts with propagating plants in tissue culture, progressing to a few plants in potting mix in screenhouses then moving to the field for further increase. At each cycle, the goal is to use mother plants to produce daughter plants vegetatively and each mother-to-daughter cycle takes several months. It then takes a few years of increasing plants from mother to daughters to get to a point when there are enough plants for commercial production.

There is significant incentive for making this vegetative propagation system more efficient. Such a system is possible using seed. The plants would not have to be produced in open fields where there is room for production of runners and daughter plants. The seed could be sown directly into trays and kept at optimum temperature and moisture. The technology for automating the seeding process has been around for many decades. An example of this type of automated seeding technology is shown below (Fig. 1) for lettuce in Italy. The resulting plug plant would be much more amenable to automated planting because the plant and plug would be a uniform size. Unlike lettuce, it would take strawberries about 60 to 90 days to reach a transplantable plant size from seed. Still, it’s a huge time savings if you are measuring the time it takes to produce millions of daughter plants/seedlings from a single plant/seed.

Starting a strawberry crop by direct seeding in the field would not be a viable option since you don’t have the right kind of seedbed, conditions or time to nurture that tiny seed to a fruiting plant within the timeframe of our typical California strawberry season. That timeframe limitation of the field can be overcome by getting things started in the greenhouse.

One of the beautiful things about producing plants from seed is that soilborne pathogens can be eliminated. As long as the potting mix is sterile (easily done using steam, but costly) and the seed is pathogen free (not so easy), you can produce disease-free transplants without the need for soil fumigation. That’s a big benefit.

What about genetic uniformity? This is a big obstacle and one that Ohalo claims to have a solution for. Their hybrid breeding system called “Boosted Breeding” aims to overcome this obstacle by producing uniform seed. If they can do that, it’s a huge advance. Others have tried the “seed” method of propagating strawberries (e.g., ABZ Seeds) but so far the California strawberry industry’s preference is using the bareroot transplant method (Fig. 2).

Either way, there are multiple variables to work out before this is ready for prime time. It is exciting to see a new twist to an old idea entering the strawberry industry. We will be watching it carefully. The potential benefits are great but there will definitely be bumps in the road ahead.