Froberg Farm shares the importance of protecting crops during winter

ALVIN, Texas - Farmers experience all four seasons like the rest of us, but winter is when farmers go the extra mile to protect their crops. 

Tyler Froberg took FOX 26 on a tour of these fields and told us all about this white cloth and black plastic protecting strawberries.

"So behind us is a field of strawberries. Even though it doesn't look like that, it looks like a field of snow, but that is a frost blanket," said Froberg. "These blankets breathe a little bit, so they keep a little bit of the wind chill off the plants."

SUGGESTED: North Texas seeing intense snowy weather

Froberg shares that a string is placed over the row of crop to keep that cloth off of the plants. He adds if the cloth freezes, and it touches the leaf of that plant, it could lead to frost damage.

Continuing to water the plants under frost blankets – Tyler says Froberg Farm took measures to make sure the water didn’t freeze. 

"We shut the well off, we drained the lines," Froberg said. 

Although the water didn’t freeze, there were some strawberries that didn’t survive the cold. 

Froberg says the white cloth covers five rows each, even though it can take about two days and multiple hands to do so. 

Froberg says that if a plant is not covered, the results will be cold weather damage to the fruit. 

"Here on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Once the sun warms up, it normally warms up well above freezing, but often times at night the ambient temperature doesn’t get freezing, but the wind chill can get freezing, so protecting that wind chill from those plants is so important," Froberg said. "This frost cloth becomes really cheap insurance. And what we do here, we could actually see two rows that aren't covered, and we can go and say ‘how effective was this?’ And this morning we walked out here, and we saw that about 30% of those blooms had died." 

SUGGESTED: North Texas dealing with record breaking winter weather

Froberg says the cost of not covering the plant is expensive for a farm like his family’s. 

"So every time a cold event happens, and that plant doesn't get protected, we start over because it takes 21 days for the plant to bloom, the flower to be pollinated and to form the fruit," Froberg says. "Ultimately, what it comes down to is if we are worried, about cold weather then we are going to cover. Everything is in place to do. It takes about a day and a half to two days in the field to get it covered. So we do it because it's the safe thing to do."