Sort of surprised this morning to see my name included in a feature article on strawberry farming and rainwater runoff, especially from fields on steep hillsides.
My quotes are from an interview that happened a loooong time ago, but still they are pretty apropos in my mind.
One of the things when you talk with a Farm Advisor is that you get straight answers, and in this case yes it is true that strawberry bed plastic is an essential part of strawberry farming, no two ways around it. I am fully aware what this plastic does as far as impeding soil water absorption and Michael Cahn, Richard Smith and I looked into mitigating this a few years ago (see article below), but the fact of the matter it's still a lot of water coming down that hill when it rains and it has to go somewhere.
http://cemonterey.ucanr.edu/files/171012.pdf
The math for the "Olympic size swimming pool" volume of water coming off of a 30 acre field comes from here:
One acre inch of rain = 27154 gal water x 30 acres = 814620 gallons
Volume water in Olympic size swimming pool 25 m x 50 m x 2 m = 660430 gallons
Assuming some loss from ground absorption and so yeah it's about a big pool's worth of water.