Reinvention & Ichigo Farms

March 30, 2026 fruitqueen .

In his telling, John Louie began growing strawberries at the request of his bachan, his grandma. The family farm, Green Valley Floral, had greenhouse space to spare, and in Japan, where bachan was born, strawberries are greenhouse-grown for winter harvests. So John began experimenting. First, he began growing Albions, the sweet and classic staple of California strawberry growers. Soon after, John’s father Curtis dove into the world of Japanese strawberries and they found a previously unknown world of flavor. They began trialing varieties sourced from Japan that are rarely, if ever, grown in the US. These strawberries, like the Suki, are bred for flavor and aroma first, with little concern for shippability, shelf life, or berry size, traits prized in the industrial system. They found the Japanese berries more challenging to grow, yielding harvests that are a fraction of many American varieties. But the flavor blew them away – and in the so-called off-season, no less. Ichigo means strawberry in Japanese, so naturally they named the new project Ichigo Farms.

John’s story about growing strawberries for his bachan may be true, or it may be a bit of savvy myth-making. Probably, it’s both. But when you learn the history of the Matsuno-Louie family, stretching back three generations in Salinas, you come to understand it a little differently, as part of a pattern. Or a family trait, perhaps.

Curtis, Janet, and John Louie of Ichigo Farms

For more than 50 years, the Matsuno-Louie family has been growing in the Salinas Valley. Tomi and Michael Matsuno were part of a second wave of Japanese migration to California, leaving behind post-war economic devastation, and settling across the road from where the farm now sits. Like many Japanese farm families in the area, they specialized in growing cut flowers. They started with carnations. Over time they moved across the road and expanded into roses. In 1973 they founded Green Valley Floral. That the family is still growing in Salinas is a testament to resilience, yes, but also to a quietly radical spirit of reinvention and a remarkable tolerance for risk. Maybe most of all, they are still growing because each generation has empowered the next to reinvent the farm.

Janet, Tomi and Michael’s daughter, grew up on the farm. And like many farm kids, when she left for college she never looked back. In 1989, she met Curtis Louie, her future husband. Soon after, back at the farm, the Matsunos lost their general manager. Would they come back to the farm to lend a hand? So in 1990, Janet was back, along with Curtis, who had left a job as a corporate accountant for life on the farm. They agreed to stay for a year. Thirty-five years later, they’re still at it.

Janet, walking the strawberry rows

Janet and Curtis’ move to the farm coincided with a change so profound it’s hard to overstate its significance for coastal flower growers. In 1991, the US passed the Andean Trade Preference Act, offering Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru duty-free access to the American market. The exemptions covered thousands of products, including cut flowers. The trade deal was a carrot in the drug war, a policy tool meant to incentivize economic pursuits apart from coca. In Salinas and Watsonville, the centers of American cut flower production, it was catastrophic. By the mid-1990s, local growers were struggling to compete with cheaper imported flowers. Over the following years, most of these family farms were closed and sold off. By an unofficial count, there are two cut flower grower-shippers left in Salinas, of the 60 or 70 family farms operating a generation ago. Green Valley Floral is one of them.

Within a few years of starting work at the farm, Curtis set out to convince the family to transition to hydroponics. Some of the greenhouses were poorly sited, built on heavy clay soils. In others, the plants struggled with disease pressure built up in the soil from years of cultivating the same crop. The move would be expensive, requiring significant upfront capital to retrofit the greenhouses, but the changes should help improve flower quality and production. It would also allow the farm to move away from the intensive pesticide use that growing the same plant in the same soil year after year requires. In retrospect, Curtis was a newcomer to the farm, to the family – really even to farming, period. And yet Michael and Tomi empowered him to take the risk.

Fast forward a decade. By the early aughts, the farm had been struggling for years to compete in the remade floral market. Green Valley had earned their reputation on quality, but still, revenues had trended downward for years. Around this time, by chance, Janet and Curtis met David Austin, a breeder offine English garden roses. (For many people, a rose is a rose, by any name. These people may be unfamiliar with garden roses, whose deeply ruffled petals awash in stunning pastels might be sculptures made of tissue paper if not for the fragrance. These are roses.) David Austin had just begun offering licenses to grow these sought-after cultivars, and the Louies sensed an opportunity. They again made an expensive leap, betting that specialization would help differentiate the farm. They began with David Austin English garden roses, adding Japanese garden roses soon after. In a sense, these flowers helped them opt out of the commodity flower market and position Green Valley as what it is, an artisan enterprise.

Fast forward fifteen years. John, now in his 30s, is freshly back on the farm after college in Vermont and a stint working in Big Lettuce. He begins growing strawberries to fulfill his grandmother’s wish. It goes well. The strawberries are delicious! Bachan is so proud.

Curtis Louie with a Haruhi strawberry

Let me re-frame this tidy story. Fifty years in, a flower farm makes a hard left turn and starts growing strawberries. During the winter. In a sea of the biggest corporate strawberry farms in the United States, in a region where expertise in strawberry-growing is perhaps the deepest, the farm decides to grow them completely differently. Cultivation, picking, post-harvest handling – all different from the flower operation, all new for the flower crew. The workers, some of whom have been with Green Valley for decades, must be retrained, and then re-retrained as they learn how to do this on the fly. Market channels, customers – they’ll need new ones. John isn’t being sly, he’s being humble. This is all new, and risky.

Of course, it’s also genius. Fully-ripened strawberries, from farm to market within a day of being picked, in December? Growing varieties that aren’t otherwise available. Making the best use of a skilled team that’s been with them for years. Something entirely new, grown in the same greenhouses that John’s grandfather built. And finding a way around direct competition with the giant strawberry farms in the neighborhood. Genius.

Empowered by his bachan, and by his parents, Ichigo is John’s reinvention of the farm.