>>If you took a survey on favorite desserts, strawberries would certainly be near the top of the list.

Think about it, strawberry shortcake, strawberry tarts, strawberry pie.

Team up strawberries with rhubarb or lemon and you have even more choices.

Well, our Akiba Howard takes us to California where one farm family sees a sweet future in raising these ripe, red berries.

♪♪ >>Enjoy a day at a fair or festival anywhere in the heartland and it's a good bet that strawberries will be a popular pick on the snack food menu.

♪♪ That's certainly the case at this festival in Santa Maria, California: a town surrounded by fields of the bright, red berries.

Daren Gee knows a lot about strawberries.

He's been growing them for more than 25 years.

>>I think we did over 100 pallets for 'em on Tuesday.

>>Daren and his brothers raise hundreds of acres of strawberries with the help of some 12 hundred employees.

>>Everyone has a very important part to play, regardless of what portion of the business they're involved in.

If they can do that to the best of their ability they're gonna to help everyone else.

>>California leads the country in strawberry production with some 500 growers planting more than 35 thousand acres of berries.

Daren's DB specialty farms is located in the rolling hills of California's Central Coast which have an almost perfect climate for Strawberries.

>>We have one of the best weathers on the coast.

It's not too hot in the day and it's not too cold at night.

>>On this spring morning, Daren and his crew are harvesting strawberries to be shipped across the country and enjoyed on a very special Sunday.

>>We're getting ready for the Mother's Day pull and Mother's Day, as it turns out, is the number one strawberry day of the year.

>>Really?

>>Yeah, more strawberries are consumed on that day than any other day in the whole entire year.

♪♪ >>Daren's crew is picking a strawberry variety called the Albion.

Daren and University of California plant breeder, Doug Shaw have worked together to foster new varieties.

They call it building a better berry.

>>The process of releasing a strawberry variety takes about seven years from the time we make a cross to the time we release it to the industry.

This is our primary seedling test plot.

This is the first stage of our field testing.

If you look out here, each one of these plants is a potential cultivar in our program.

>>Doug typically starts out with about 10,000 seedlings in the test plot which eventually researchers will narrow down to an ideal cultivar through cross breeding.

Once satisfied with their new breed, researchers create genetically identical copies of the plant otherwise known as runner plants.

>>If you look at Daren's field for example, and you look at the Albion cultivar, each one of those plants in his field traces to the runners that came from a single plant out here.

>>The technology and chemistry have vastly changed the industry in just one generation.

>>I think if you put somebody in a strawberry field that was a strawberry grower forty years ago, they wouldn't recognize it at all today.

>>We've had absolutely massive changes.

I mean the consumption of strawberries in the United States is definitely hard to believe, I mean last year we- we sold 172 million boxes of strawberries in the United States.

>>Which keeps Daren and his crew planting multiple strawberry crops year round.

>>Every one of these plants were hand planted.

Every single one of 'em.

We planted this year 16 million of them.

>>Out of the field, the strawberries are sent off to be cooled.

>>It's 85,000 square feet of cooling space.

We have to get them all the way down to 34 degrees, 33 degrees, as close to freezing as we possibly can without freezing them.

Then what we do is wrap 'em up in like a plastic and suck all the oxygen out and put CO2 in.

Now the C02 is to reduce the aging process.

>>And from there, they make their way to grocery stores as well as being shipped overseas.

>>California Giant markets these strawberries all over the United States, Canada and we're scheduled to go into France sometime in mid-May.

>>Research, planting, harvests and sales, challenges faced by farmers here and all across the heartland.

>>It's the challenge of dealing with nature and being successful at it because she's really competitive and then having a product that people can eat and enjoy and that's actually nutritious.

I love strawberries.

♪♪