Record cranberry harvest a mixed blessing for growers

loading...

MACHIAS – Maine’s cranberry harvest soared to more than 9,000 barrels this year, almost tripling the 1999 crop of 3,100 barrels.

Cranberries are sold in 100-pound barrels, and this year’s average yield per acre was 65.5 barrels – up from the record-breaking 45.7 barrels in 1998, according to Charles Armstrong, the University of Maine cranberry specialist.

Last year’s crop suffered from winter damage and a dry summer and the yield per acre was 23.8 barrels an acre, he said.

“I’d attribute this year’s higher yields to Mother Nature and the simple fact that the beds are starting to reach their full potential,” he said.

Cranberry bogs take five to six years to mature and Maine’s commercial cranberry industry is 12 years old. Armstrong said the 2000 harvest of 9,021 barrels came from 138 of the Maine’s 262 acres of cranberries.

This year’s record-breaker is a mixed blessing for the state’s 32 cranberry growers, some of whom turned to pick-your-own operations or roadside sales this fall as prices to growers fell below the cost of production for the second year running.

Armstrong said growers estimate production costs at 35 cents a pound. This year, cranberry processors are paying 10 to 20 cents a pound, he said.

Maine’s first commercial cranberry beds were planted in 1989, part of a nationwide response to the cranberry shortages and correspondingly high prices of the late 1980s.

Growers in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Oregon expanded their acreage, and entrepreneurs planted new bogs. By 1999, the growth in production resulted in large surpluses, driving grower prices down to 30 to 32 cents a pound.

Grower prices had been as high as 80 cents a pound in 1996.

As this year’s harvest began, the nationwide cranberry surplus was 4.6 million barrels, about 80 percent of the annual harvest.

As a result, growers in Massachusetts and other large cranberry-producing states – which operate under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s federal marketing order for cranberries – agreed to limit this year’s harvest to 85 percent of the 1999 harvest.

In exchange for that agreement, the USDA is providing grower subsidies of $5 a barrel, up to 16,000 barrels a grower, for the 1999 harvest. Maine’s industry is too small to fall under the federal marketing order, but Maine growers are eligible for the subsidy on their 1999 crops.

That will provide some assistance. But Maine’s 1999 harvest was just 3,100 barrels, Armstrong said.

“We’re all losing money,” said Ed Flanagan, president of Jasper Wyman & Son in Milbridge, one of Maine’s largest blueberry companies. Wyman’s processes cranberries from its own land and is one of two Washington County companies that buys cranberries from Maine growers. Almost 85 percent of Maine’s cranberry acreage is in Washington County.

Flanagan said Friday that Wyman’s is paying growers 20 cents a pound for this year’s crop.

“Maine isn’t a leader in the cranberry industry and we have to compete with the big guys,” Flanagan said. “We’re out there selling our product now, and we’ll review our price to growers as we go along.”

But even at 20 cents a pound, Wyman’s is ahead of Ocean Spray, the large Massachusetts growers’ cooperative, and Decas Cranberry Co., the largest independent cranberry company in Massachusetts, Flanagan said.

Ocean Spray is paying 10.75 cents a pound, and Decas is paying between 15 and 17 cents a pound, he said.

Wyman’s has 40 acres of company land planted in cranberries, and 16 of those acres were harvested this year, he said. The additional acreage hasn’t matured.

Many smaller growers turned to selling fresh cranberries through pick-your-own operations or at roadside this year.

Helene Hammond said she and her husband, Robert, charged $1 a pound for pick-your-own and $1.50 a pound for already picked cranberries from their Harrington bog.

This was the family’s first year offering pick-your-own, and Hammond said they had many more customers than they expected. The Washington-Hancock Farm Bureau published lists of pick-your-own operations, and the Hammonds received calls from people in other parts of the state, Hammond said.

“Most people were just passing through and a lot of them wanted to see the operation,” she said. “We didn’t do any advertising ourselves, but I think we will next year.”

But the Hammond crop was larger than the number of pick-your-own customers, so the family did sell some for processing, Hammond said.

Judy Farnsworth said she and her husband, Richard, have been selling fresh cranberries at a roadside stand in front of their County Road Cranberry Bog in Columbia Falls for the past three years.

The Farnsworths own 11/2 acres of cranberries on U.S. Route 1. Judy Farnsworth said the couple charges $2.50 for a bag that contains well over a pound of cranberries.

“I had more out-of-state customers this year and quite a few of them were farmers,” she said. “I never realized it before, but I think when you’re a farmer, you notice farm stands more.”

Farnsworth said a woman from Texas called her on Thanksgiving to tell her how good her cranberries were and to tell her she’d be ordering more.

And a Louisiana customer, whom Farnsworth tried to persuade not to pay postage for something she could buy locally, called her three times, asking for more cranberries.

“I’ve met some of the most delightful people doing this,” Farnsworth said.

Mike McFarland and his wife, Pat, grow less than an acre of organic cranberries on their Ellsworth farm and sell them in health food stores from Ellsworth to Hampton Beach, N.H.

The stores sell the organic fruit at retail prices of up to $4 for a 12-ounce bag, McFarland said. He said he has seen the same quantity of fresh berries from Ocean Spray selling for as low as 99 cents.

Organic farming is labor-intensive, and driving the fruit as far as New Hampshire isn’t easy, but demand for organic products appears to be growing, he said.

“But, you can’t make a living on just cranberries,” McFarland said.