MACHIAS – If current prices for Maine wild blueberries persist, many growers are going to go out of business, according to the University of Maine Extension blueberry specialist.

David Yarborough said Thursday that the 2002 field price – the amount that growers receive for fruit that will be processed – was 25 cents a pound.

“That’s a 17-year low, and 25 cents was worth more 17 years ago than it is today,” Yarborough said.

The cost of production for most wild blueberry fields in Maine is at least 32 cents a pound.

Fresh packers – growers who sell premium fruit on the fresh market – fared better, at $1.40 a pound. But only 300,000 pounds of the 2002 crop of 62.3 million pounds was sold fresh, Yarborough said.

A cool spring delayed bloom and hampered pollination and a dry summer produced a harvest that was 15.3 million pounds below Maine’s five-year average. But the short crop did not help the price.

The field price has been on the decline for the past several years, dropping from 51 cents a pound in 1999 to 30 cents in 2001.

One of the biggest reasons for the drop is Quebec, one of the five eastern Canada provinces that – like Maine – produce wild blueberries.

Until recently, Quebec’s average crop was 24 million pounds, but last year the province produced 45 million pounds. The year before that, the Quebec harvest was 55 million pounds.

To sell those large crops, Quebec flooded the market with low-price berries, forcing Maine processors to meet those prices.

Yarborough said Thursday that Maine’s wild blueberry industry is asking the state’s congressional delegation to help with the situation in Quebec, which is putting additional pressure on an industry that is trying to keep pace with massive increases in production.

“There are just so many blueberries,” Yarborough said.

For the past 20 years, the combined Maine-Canadian wild blueberry crop has grown at an average of 5 million pounds a year, according to a paper Yarborough presented recently.

Maine and Canada now produce an average of 150 million pounds of wild blueberries a year, he said, and markets have not kept pace.

Part of the increase in production stems from a growth in the number of acres of blueberry land in Maine and Canada, he said.

Since 1980, Maine had added 10,000 acres of wild blueberry land, bringing the state’s total to 65,000 acres, he said.

New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have added more than 15,000 acres, for a total of 61,000 acres, and Prince Edward Island soon will have nearly 6,000 acres in production. Quebec has 40,000 acres of wild blueberries, plus hundreds of thousands of provincial crown land that grows blueberries and could be improved.

And that is just wild blueberries, which don’t produce as high a yield per acre as cultivated blueberries, Yarborough said. There are more than 48,000 acres of cultivated blueberries in North America, he said.

While the increase in acreage is substantial, improved management techniques are responsible for most of the growth in production, he said.

The use of herbicides, fertilizers and commercial honeybees has doubled yield per acre in some fields, and irrigation can increase yields by another 43 percent, according to Yarborough.

North America’s total production of blueberries in 2002 was 390.5 million pounds, the highest yet, Yarborough said.