A year of hope lost in 15 minutes: Hail devastates Sask. strawberry farm
Aishwarya Dudha | CBC News | Posted: July 8, 2026 6:27 PM | Last Updated: 12 hours ago
Weekend hailstorm completely destroyed strawberry fields at Prairie Pathways
Hail tore through strawberry fields at Prairie Pathways just outside of Saskatoon last weekend. It shredded the strawberry crop down to the crown, according to the owner Dan Erlandson — foliage gone, berries gone, nothing left above ground.
“It’s really disheartening.… There’s a pit in your stomach when you see something like that. You spend all winter planning and hoping,” he said told CBC’s Saskatoon Morning. “It’s a year’s worth of hope and you lose it in 15 minutes.”
He said the plants were worth $50,000, put in the ground in early May with three months of production riding on them.
Now, there may be no strawberry harvest at all this summer.
Erlandson said there’s no replanting now. No crowns are available this late in the season and there’s no root system left to support new ones anyway. All he can do is wait and hope for regrowth.
The best case scenario, he said, is strawberries by September.
“I think that would be a win and a way to salvage it a little bit,” he said.
Erlandson said some of his other crops are doing better, like the corn maze and sunflowers. The jury is still out on the pumpkins.
He plans to open this weekend regardless, with vegetables, honey and local goods on offer while the strawberry patch tries to heal.
Meanwhile, on the west side of the city, Peter Rhodes didn’t lose a berry.
Rhodes has run his u-pick berry farm for 23 years, growing Saskatoons, raspberries, blackcurrants and sea buckthorn. He’s 93 and still works eight-hour days, six days a week.
He said this year’s crop is the best he’s ever had, even if his berries are a bit behind schedule, delayed by a cold spring. He expects them to ripen soon if the warm weather sticks around.
“Everything’s a benefit to me,” Rhodes said. “For some people, probably not.”
