Even before cases of strawberry sabotage crippled sales and cost the industry millions of dollars, Australian growers were despairing over dumping tonnes of perfectly good fruit that was too small or odd-shaped to find a market.

Mandy Schultz choked back tears as she described the impact a strawberry glut and falling prices have had on the small farm she runs with her husband Adrian and his parents at Wamuran, north of Brisbane.

"Adrian works for six months of the year, he goes from 6:30 in the morning, comes home at 8:30 at night six days a week, and when you work that hard you really hope for it to have a positive outcome," she said.

"We've been able to provide a great lifestyle for the kids but financially it's not been good."

The family has been fighting back by freezing and stockpiling some of the strawberries destined to be dumped.

They mobilised customers through a Facebook group, encouraging them to meet Mandy and buy her excess stock at what she calls "car park parties" set up in the suburbs.

"It's stopping waste that we don't even realise is happening," loyal customer Anne Matthews said.

"As a general [rule], we go to the store, we buy our fruit and vegetables, but we don't realise that the farmers aren't getting enough for the product and how much waste and cost they've incurred to get it to us."

Wamuran strawberry farmers Adrian and Mandy Schultz have been hit hard by the strawberry glut, with falling prices hurting their bottom line. ( ABC News: Jennifer Nichols )

The family's growing season has ended but their "car park parties" have expanded to include new suburbs, cities and towns, finding a use for their frozen strawberries and surplus frozen fruit from other farms.

"This time last year we thought we were really clever and excited, we had 500 people that got involved with our group," Ms Schultz said.

"Because we started helping other farmers, that group has now hit over 5,100."

Freeze drying a solution to tonnes of waste

But it's another value-added product that this enterprising mum and dietician believes has even greater potential: freeze-dried strawberries.

"Crunch with punch, they're lovely and crispy and it's just pure strawberries," Ms Schultz said.

"I got really fed up with seeing kids eating a lot of artificial colours and flavours and a lot of our processed strawberry products in our supermarket are actually imported."

The Schultz family turned to freeze drying as a way to extend the shelf life of the fruit and find a use for marked or damaged berries. ( ABC News: Jennifer Nichols )

Freeze drying extends the shelf life of perishable fruit and finds a use for berries marked by rain.

Ms Schutlz said freeze-dried, preservative-free strawberry powder was also popular with cooks.

"You can just throw it all over your ice cream, you can put it in your yoghurt, I use mine in my chia pudding, it is just beautiful," she said.

After last year's test run proved popular, the family loaded up a tonne of reject strawberries and trucked them off to a freeze-drying factory as a positive step towards improving farm turnover.

But even with new strawberry products, the family can no longer rely solely on a single fruit and has diversified into finger limes and herbs.

Mr Schultz, who is also the vice-president of the Queensland Strawberry Growers Association, said costs had risen and returns weren't what they used to be.

"We are seeing strawberry farms fail on a yearly basis and I wouldn't be surprised if we have more this year," he said.

The take-up of new varieties like the Queensland-bred red rhapsody have increased productivity, but Mr Schultz said the biggest challenge for the industry was the number of plants in the ground.

Queensland provides up to 30,000 tonnes of strawberries to the nation throughout winter and spring.

Freeze drying is a possible solution to the oversupply in strawberries in Queensland. ( ABC News: Jennifer Nichols )

"Queensland I think has 45 million plants in the ground, the average plant should produce three punnets, so that's 130 million punnets that come out of Queensland alone," Mr Schultz said.

"I mean we've only got 25 million people in the country, so we'll either have to look at other solutions, export being one of them, or we're going have to try and rationalise it as an industry itself and see if we can actually reduce the amount of runners that are being grown."

The dynamics of Australian strawberry growing have changed, with fewer farms producing more fruit.

Bigger businesses operate in different regions and states to provide year-round supply direct to supermarkets and reduce the risk of damaging weather events.

Australia's biggest grower hunting for a market

It is not just small growers that are gambling on freeze drying for a better future.

Toan Nguyen and Gina Dang are a husband-and-wife team from SSS Strawberries.

SSS Strawberries in Bundaberg is one of Australia's biggest strawberry farms. ( ABC News: Jennifer Nichols )

They trucked 40 tonnes of strawberries to a cold-storage facility on the Sunshine Coast from their large family-owned farm in Bundaberg.

SSS Strawberries has also invested in Freeze Dry Industries, a factory in Yandina, and have scaled up production.

They aim to produce a viable alternative to imports for food manufacturers in Australia, as well as targeting the export industry, but they've yet to find a market for freeze-dried strawberries.

Over 12 years, the company expanded from 200,000 to 2.4 million strawberry plants, and despite donating fruit to local charities and drought drives, dozens of pallets they weren't able to sell went to waste every day.

"That's why we're looking for a value-added product to see if we could use all of this waste, as well as maybe even help the industry because we're just one farm, but so many other growers around the region and the country would have this waste," Ms Dang said.

SSS Strawberries' Toan Nguyen and Gina Dang are banking on freeze drying to reduce their waste.

The family has also diversified into real estate, building SSS villas with 31 units each to provide safe and clean accommodation for their 300 workers during the strawberry season and house other farms' workers during the rest of the year.

Mr Nguyen said they became motivated to build after talking to workers about where they had been living.

"Very filthy dirty places, kitchens they had to share with so many other people," he said.

"We could see the effects when they turned up to work [in] their eyes — they hadn't slept all night."

Selling up after 46 years in the industry

The challenges facing strawberry growers have resulted in one of Queensland's longest strawberry-farming families exiting the industry.

For 46 years, Rick Twist, his twin brothers Jeff and David and their wives supplied sweet seasonal fruit from Chevallum on the Sunshine Coast to all over Australia.

"[In] 1972 we started preparing the farm for strawberries," Rick Twist said.

"The brothers and I, we didn't have much money, I think it was $2,000, so we grew some small crops to cash it up and we were lucky to have $8,000 at the end of that and that was the start of our strawberry thing."

David, Rick and Jeff Twist of Twist Brothers Strawberry Farm at Chevallum have left the industry after 46 years. ( ABC News: Jennifer Nichols )

The brothers made a business decision to turn their fields over to turf and have ploughed in their last crop of strawberries.

"August last year I rang my wife in the shed and my sister-in-law in the patch to see how many workers they had together and it was over 200 people," David Twist said.

"Then I rang my other brothers and I said to them, we'd better get together here and discuss what we're going to do because this is ridiculous.

"We've got to make all this money to cover their wages, plus the fertiliser, plus the chemicals, plus all the electricity bills and all that.

"I said we can't do this any more. It's time to do something different."

"It is when you finish up people realise, oh hang on, there's 230 jobs gone, plus all the businesses that we're related to and what we required to run our farm, that's enormous."

The Twist brothers were lucky to have finished harvesting before stories of strawberries sabotaged with sewing needles hit the headlines, leading to the unprecedented dumping of fruit around Australia.

Rick Twist only hopes that growers who were already under pressure survive the impact of the food-tampering saga.

"I feel sad," he said.

"I've a lot of good friends in the industry, it's a good industry."

Watch this story on Landline on Sunday at 12:30pm.