Welcome back my friends to the Beat

podcast we're talking today with Gerald Holmes the founding director of the

Strawberry Center at California State University and we're talking to him

about the Strawberry Center.

So you know when I went up, Gerald, a quick story, I guess a while ago now, maybe half my life ago,

to go check out schools. The thing that I didn't know at the time is how much of a gardener I would become.

I hadn't grown a plant in my life really up until that point. But when I went up to Cal Poly slow,

there was a viticulture program.

There was a pasture program.

There's a pasture program.

There's only these sort of agricultural fields.

And I thought that was so interesting.

And honestly, in a different life, I probably would have gone there instead of

University of California, stand up Barbara. I got an economics degree and you know I don't think that hurt me at all but would have been cool to have a bit more of an educational background

and plants given what I do today so when we talk about the strawberry

center I kind of love to just know what it actually is. Yeah, thank you for

asking. The Strawberry Center is a partnership between

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and the California Strawberry Commission. The

California Strawberry Commission is an organization that represents all of the

growers, processors, and shippers of strawberries in the state of California. That's about 300 to 400 different people.

And Cal Poly has a reputation for being a great agricultural school with programs in all areas of agriculture.

Our College of Agriculture is I think the fourth or fifth largest college of agriculture in the country.

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