UPDATE AUGUST 2026 - Organic Consumers Association sues Driscoll's!
Strawberries got their name from farmers covering the plants with straw in Autumn to hold moisture in the soil and protect the berries from weeds in Spring and dirt in Summer. If Driscoll’s covers the ground with plastic instead of straw, shouldn’t we call their produce plasticberries?
Driscoll’s is the world’s largest berry company. Neighboring communities, clean-food activists, and a whistleblower from inside the company say Driscoll’s berries are treated with pesticides applied above legal limits and grown without soil in an excessive amount of plastic, leaving residues of toxins including PFAS “forever chemicals” and microplastics.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Driscoll’s you won’t be eating their plasticberries!
Omar Dieguez and Adam Scow of the Campaign for Organic and Regenerative Agriculture live in Watsonville, California, where Driscoll’s is headquartered. The Organic Consumers Association’s Alexis Baden-Mayer spoke with them for Regeneration International’s 2025 People’s Food Summit. Omar had just come off a month-long hunger strike to press Driscoll’s to stop spraying pesticides next to schools.
Nearly a year later, Driscoll’s still hasn’t met Omar’s demand, but his campaign is gaining steam with help from a lawsuit filed by David Harada, a former employee who alleges the company concealed violations of pesticide safety laws, and testing by Mamavation that found PFAS pesticide residues on Driscoll’s berries.
Harada, Driscoll’s Manager of Food Safety and Regulatory Compliance, filed a whistleblower lawsuit providing evidence that for years the company over-applied pesticides in violation of Federal and California laws and then expected him to cover it up. The complaint reveals the Food and Drug Administration sent two separate notices to the company about people getting sick from eating Driscoll’s produce.
Testing by Mamavation found Driscoll’s non-organic strawberries contained residues of 12 different pesticides at levels prohibited in the European Union, Taiwan, Chile, Korea, and Russia. Eight of those are fluorinated pesticides that qualify as PFAS “forever chemicals.” They accumulate in our bodies and are associated with cancer, reproductive problems, developmental delays, and immune suppression. Those levels fall within US limits, which is at the heart of the problem: the US still allows PFAS at levels other countries have deemed unsafe. Based on Mamvation's testing, a class action was filed June 26, 2026, alleging the company marketed its strawberries as "safe, premium and sustainably grown" while concealing PFAS pesticide contamination.
Driscoll's USDA Organic berries are better, but not perfect. For years Driscoll's got away with clearing land for their plastic operations with Monsanto’s carcinogenic glyphosate-based Roundup weedkiller just weeks before getting certified organic! This isn’t allowed anymore, but there were no consequences for past violations. They even lobbied the National Organic Standards Board to change the rules so they could grow berries in containers without soil!
In the U.S., Driscoll’s growing operations hardly deserve to be called “farms”. The ground is covered with plastic and the plants are in plastic pots. In Mexico, it’s the same, but worse. Instead of ruining farmland that was already poisoned with toxic pesticides and fertilizers, they’re clearing virgin forests and stealing water from the few remaining real farms, siphoning water from streams and illegally drilling deep wells where the aquifers are nearly dry.
In Michoacán, the surface water available for irrigation is limited and contaminated, but the cultivation of berries for export requires irrigation with clean water, so Driscoll’s digs wells illegally—leaving its neighbors without water.
(The Lake Pátzcuaro basin is home to the Purépecha people and the heartland of the Tarascan state, which rivaled the Aztec Empire before the Spanish conquest.)
The farmers around Lake Pátzcuaro blame the water scarcity on Driscoll’s and former Michoacán governor Silvano Aureoles who they say illegally gave Driscoll’s government machinery to clear the land and drill the wells. The farmers claim that Aureoles profited personally from deals he made with Driscoll’s.
Governor Aureoles promised special security to the berry producers and legal certainty so that they would continue their production. Today, all the land where the strawberries are grown is protected by heavily armed people.
"White guards, they call them, they bring large-caliber weapons, they have intimidated many of us, they have tried to uproot us," a farmer quoted in 2021 by El Sol De Morelia said.
The farmers who protested Aureoles were hopeful that the new governor, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, would stand up for his people against the multinational, but just like Aureoles, he has facilitated Driscoll’s expansion.
In 2022, Bedolla helped Driscoll’s open its 15th refrigerated warehouse and packing plant in Mexico.
In 2024, Driscoll’s invested $1.7 million in an expanded strawberry nursery in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, Mexico. Check out the photos from their launch. Does it look anything like a farm to you? A plastic farm maybe.
Driscoll changed the USDA Organic rules so it could grow organic berries like this, too, in plastic with no soil!
Driscoll’s photos show how their strawberries are grown in Michoacán… in containers. This Driscoll’s berry nursery doesn’t have a blade of grass growing on it! There used to be forests and farms here. Now it might as well be a parking lot. This type of agriculture shouldn’t exist at all, but it’s better suited to a city than the countryside.
All of this started with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Before Driscoll’s could move in, 4.9 million family farmers had to be shoved off their land. Not only did this open up farmland in ideal climates, it created a steady flow of landless peasants available for farm work. The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that from 1991 to 2007 some 4.9 million family farmers were displaced. Some found work with big exporting agricultural companies like Driscoll’s, but there was still a net loss of 1.9 million jobs.
The Mexico Solidarity Project warns against buying Driscoll’s berries, even if they’re certified Fair Trade. In 2015, tens of thousands of Driscoll’s farm workers went on strike for three months. They did win some demands, but conditions quickly reverted to “normal.” Later that year, SINDJA (Sindicato Independiente Nacional Democrática de Jornaleros Agrícolas) was formed. A groundbreaking “Boycott Driscoll” campaign stretched across borders, from San Quintín to Washington state. Farmworkers in Washington state won a historic contract on a farm selling to Driscoll’s, but SINDJA remains without a contract. It was after that strike that Driscoll sought a partnership with Fair Trade U.S.A. to repair its public image and prevent future disruptions to its operations.
TAKE ACTION: Tell Driscoll’s to stop growing pesticide-drenched plasticberries on deforested land with sweated labor and stolen water!