Nestled in the mountainous terrain of western India, Mahabaleshwar stands as the beating heart of India’s strawberry cultivation. More than 85% of the country’s total strawberry output grows across its slopes, where an elevation exceeding 1,000 meters creates the ideal cool growing window from November to March, and light, well-drained soil offers the perfect foundation for the delicate fruit. But for the thousands of smallholder farmers who call this region home, strawberry farming is far from a straightforward livelihood.
The industry is inherently labor-intensive, and its profitability hangs on the whims of unpredictable weather. “If sudden heavy rains arrive when your field is full of fruit, the entire crop is destroyed, and we face catastrophic losses,” explains Sheetal Danavle, who alongside her husband devotes half of their 3-acre family farm to strawberries. Unlike many staple crops, strawberry plants must be replaced entirely every growing season, and they are not propagated from seed. This means farmers must purchase new young starter plants from licensed suppliers each year, a major upfront expenditure that costs Danavle roughly $2,500 annually. While a strong, dry season can deliver returns double the initial investment, erratic climate patterns turn the entire enterprise into what Danavle describes as “a huge gamble.”
Despite these challenges, strawberries have emerged as one of western India’s most profitable horticultural crops, supporting tens of thousands of livelihoods across the region. Yet a critical gap remains in the domestic supply chain: India’s entire industry relies exclusively on patented strawberry varieties bred in the United States, Italy, Spain, and other foreign nations, with no commercially competitive indigenous cultivar available to local farmers. It takes 10 to 15 years for international breeders to develop high-yield, high-quality varieties suited for commercial production, and these cultivars are strictly protected by intellectual property patents.
Nelson Sequeira, founder and director of Tara Farms Fresh, one of India’s licensed strawberry propagators, explains that the domestic supply chain starts with imported certified mother plants from foreign breeders. After clearing mandatory government quarantine, the imported mother plants are grown in specialized nurseries, where they produce runners that develop into daughter plants sold directly to farmers. “One imported mother plant is like an engine,” Sequeira notes. On average, a single mother plant produces 20 daughter plants, with experienced operations able to coax 30 to 40 plants per mother. His nursery uses advanced precision agriculture techniques to grow new stock: plants are suspended in half-cut industrial pipe troughs filled with coconut husk-derived coco-peat substrate, rather than planted in open ground, with a carefully calibrated drip irrigation and fogging system to maintain ideal growing conditions.
For now, dependency on foreign mother plants remains the industry standard, but a collaborative research project led by two leading Indian institutions could soon upend this status quo. Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth (MPKV), an agricultural university based in Maharashtra, has partnered with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) to develop India’s first homegrown strawberry variety. Researchers are using controlled low-dose gamma irradiation on plant tissues to induce stable genetic mutations, a technique designed to cut down the decades-long breeding timeline.
Dr. Darshan Shashank Kadam, assistant professor of horticulture at MPKV, explains the project’s core goal: to create an indigenous cultivar that matches the large fruit size and firm texture of popular imported varieties, while being naturally resilient to India’s increasingly frequent heatwaves. Kadam acknowledges that full development of a commercially viable variety could still take 10 to 15 years, but the university is already supporting local farmers in the near term by creating region-specific growing guidelines, including standardized planting schedules, customized fertilizer recommendations, and tailored growth regulator protocols adapted to Mahabaleshwar’s unique climate.
Larger commercial operations with greater access to capital are already adopting innovative growing technologies to mitigate the risks of open-field farming. Ketan Yashwant Sodha, founder and CEO of Berry Fresh Agrotech, started out growing strawberries in traditional open fields, but grew frustrated after repeated crop losses to unseasonal rain during the peak growing season. “For the past decade, rain has consistently arrived during our peak harvest months of November, December, and early January. One heavy storm at peak growth can wipe out an entire season’s work,” he says.
In 2022, Sodha pivoted to experiment with hydroponic covered cultivation, a soil-free system that allows full control over water, nutrient, light, and temperature conditions. The transition was far from smooth. “I failed over and over, and suffered massive early losses,” he recalls. “Soil is forgiving of small mistakes, but hydroponics is not. A single error today leads to complete crop failure tomorrow, and recovery takes twice as long as it does in soil.”
After years of trial and error, Sodha’s operation is now seeing tangible rewards. His team has tested 19 different strawberry varieties, including rare Japanese cultivars, and is the first Indian farm testing a specialized cultivar from the Netherlands this growing season. By strictly limiting each plant to 750 milliliters of water per day, they produce berries with richer, more concentrated sugar content and deeper aroma than the waterlogged, bland fruit often produced by open-field farming. Regular nutrient testing of plant leaves and petioles allows the team to adjust nutrient mixes precisely to each plant’s needs, and a semi-open polyhouse structure enables year-round strawberry production, turning a seasonal crop into a year-round revenue stream. Now, after finalizing trial protocols and standard operating procedures, Sodha is seeking investor funding to scale his operation to a 5-acre facility capable of supporting 200,000 plants.
Even smallholder farmers are embracing new technologies to improve outcomes, often in creative ways. Krishan Bhilare, a third-generation strawberry farmer from Mahabaleshwar, remembers the arrival of the first American varieties in 1992, when he was stunned by the large size of the imported fruit. Today, Bhilare is part of a regional Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO) that has installed AI-powered weather monitoring towers at key points across member farmland. The system analyzes real-time weather data to predict incoming rain events, alerting farmers to delay pesticide and fertilizer spraying so costly inputs are not washed away by storms. The FPO is also testing vertical growing towers that stack five layers of strawberry plants in coco-peat substrate, boosting production density from 25,000 plants per acre to 125,000 plants per acre — a fivefold increase in output on the same plot of land.
Still, these high-tech upgrades remain out of reach for many small operations, or carry too much risk for low-margin farms. Danavle and her husband tested hydroponic farming back in 2017, and saw promising early results: their hydroponic strawberries were fully organic, cut labor costs by reducing the need for constant bending and pruning, and lowered spending on fertilizers and pesticides. But a powerful cyclone hit Mahabaleshwar that same year, destroying the entire hydroponic setup. “We didn’t have the capital or the courage to rebuild it,” Danavle says. Instead, she returned to traditional open-field farming — with a modern twist. Leveraging social media, Danavle now posts videos about strawberry cultivation, promotes farm visits for tourists, and allows visitors to pick and purchase berries directly from her farm, cutting out middlemen and boosting her profit margins. “Now I’m both a farmer and a social media entrepreneur,” she says.
As India’s strawberry industry continues to grow, the balance between traditional smallholder farming and cutting-edge innovation remains in flux, with ongoing research poised to reshape the sector’s dependency on foreign varieties in the coming decades.
