Trapnell Road Farms LLC is not exactly a household name, though some of you who are not familiar with the company they are a farming company, with a variety of interests in the farming world. One of those is the growing and processing of strawberries plants for their delicious, red fruit. Most of us associate that fruit with some of the best times of your childhood, and long fun summers.

Some people however are going to associate it with something much more sour. They are going to associate them with the loss of their jobs and primary sources of income. It looks like the Trapnell Road Farms LLC  facility found in Plant City will be shutting down and taking every person who is employed at the facility to  the unemployment line with in.

For those of you who are wondering that means in read numbers it is the loss of about 600 jobs when all is said and done, which is much more than is needed to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” So as you can see this closure will be more than enough to qualify as a mass layoff.

The farm will shut down its operations on the 15^th of August. For the time being the company has not made any official statement about how the layoffs are going to work. We do not know if the workers will be cut off in stages, or in one massive wave. We do not know if the workers will be give any kind of severance or if they are going to be left out of a job with nothing but the standard unemployment package.  We do know that a number of the workers will be offered positions at another local farm. That farm, known as G&D has several hundred acres of Strawberries to be farmed, but has not said at the current moment how many of the soon to be surplussed workers they will be taking on.

Of course, these are not the only company in the farming industry to have fiscal troubles in the recent past. Some of you may recall our earlier coverage of other losses in the field, “The odds are pretty good that unless you have worked in the farming industry for the last couple of years then you have not heard about PotashCorp… apparently the company believes that they can help to feed the world without some of its workers. The company is getting ready to cut back on a significant number of its workers in order to cut back on their operating expenses. The company is going to cut back on about 15 percent of the workers they currently employ, which means that about 150 of the workers are going to be out of a job in the near future.”