In Hillsboro back in the early '60s, the end of the grade-school year was marked by warm classrooms and a restlessness among us kids, squirming on the brink of liberation. It was also marked by strawberry season and thousands of acres of berry fields awaiting the arrival of young pickers. On the last day of school, each kid knew exactly where to be the next morning to catch the berry bus that would deliver us to the fields and the promise of summertime pocket money.

Even four decades later it's easy to see the sky at dawn as we lit out for the bus, taste slushy soda pop (frozen the night before) with peanut butter sandwiches, feel the mush of a rotten berry and its deep-red juice sticky between dusty fingers.

But the snapshot's of a time past. Kids growing up in Hillsboro today would have a hard time hiring themselves out as berry pickers, as there are few fields in which to pick. Land around Hillsboro that once bore fruit now bears industry. As the Silicon Forest took root in the '70s, companies bought farmers out for more cash than their crops could ever bear. (I myself grew up down the road from a girlfriend whose farmer dad, Bob Jones, is now forever commemorated by Intel's Jones Farm campus.)

But even where berry fields haven't been supplanted in Oregon, strawberries remain a problem. They aren't the simplest crop to harvest. Unlike blueberries and marionberries, which take to mechanized pickers, strawberries prefer the human touch. Given the high cost of labor, farmers have increasingly phased them out.

In Oregon from 1970 to 1990, strawberry acreage shrank by about half -- 11,000 acres to 5,700. Last year, farmers harvested about 3,000 acres of the berries. Only recently has the decline stabilized, as companies such as Kellogg's and General Mills have capitalized on the popularity of breakfast cereals mixed with dried fruit -- notably, strawberries -- and driven up demand and price.

The disappearance of Oregon berries is painful for us whose childhoods would've been slightly diminished without them. California strawberries, which dominate our stores, may be big and (usually) red, but they're no match for homegrown, as they've spent their ripening days not in the sun, but in trucks heading north from our neighbor state.

It's not just berries suffering this indignity. Fruits and vegetables of all kinds come from out of state, picked green and shipped, typically, more than a thousand miles to get to the supermarket, where they may or may not finish ripening before it's time to serve them.

As this issue of Oregon Business explores the future of agriculture, I'm also quietly celebrating the onset of summer, as it means the return of the farmers market and awesome berries just four blocks from my office. On Wednesdays at noon, I wend my way through crowds of businesspeople converging on stalls of cheese, fish, tamales, breads, cookies and, of course, produce.

It's a gustatory rebellion we're part of, and our enemy is grocery-store berries, greens, tomatoes and all other fruits and vegetables that come to us flavorless, mushy, mealy or rock hard. As we relearn to buy local and support our own communities, we're happily rediscovering our tastebuds. Though we may not spawn a resurgence of the Oregon strawberry, it'll be a pleasure to keep trying.

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Copyright 2003 Oregon Business magazine