PLANT CITY, Fla (WFLA) — Freezing temperatures can destroy strawberries. But local berry farmers know what they need to do to protect their crops. They won’t be getting much sleep Wednesday night.

This is the season where farming can get a little tricky.

“But that’s what makes it fun,” said Gary Parke with Parkesdale Farms. They have about 300 acres covered in strawberries.

“This is what we’re trying to save,” he said while pointing at what looked like a flower that will turn into a strawberry.

If temperatures look like they’ll drop below 32 degrees, they’ll use pumps to coat the berries with warm water.

“People always wonder, it’s cold and then you go and add water, they’ll say, ‘What the heck are you doing? That doesn’t make any sense.’ But they can handle 32 degrees. It can’t handle below that,” Parke said. “So we keep putting warm water on top of it, so it stays right around the 32 mark.”

He said they essentially freeze the berries to save them. They’ll look for ice to start forming on the leaves.

“When you see that the ice is starting to form and the temperature’s dropping, for example, maybe tonight, maybe around 4 o’clock in the morning, we will turn on our overhead pumps and we will run them until it gets back above 32,” Parke said.

There’s lots of berries, and money on the line. The reality of farming is that you will lose some of your crop, but Parke said this is nothing he hasn’t done before.

“The plus of my situation is I’ve lived through stuff way worse than what we’re going to see tonight,” Parke said. “The bad stuff for us is we have to stay up all night checking the temperatures and stuff like that. But the good side is the berries are always sweeter afterward.”