Cranberry crop up Down East Harvest ‘good, but not exceptional’

COLUMBIA FALLS – The harvest of cranberries Down East winds up this week, and by growers’ and specialists’ accounts, the season looks moderately promising.

“I’d say it’s been good, but not exceptional,” said Pete Grant, president of the Maine Cranberry Growers Association.

Grant has been on the go since Oct. 12, taking his harvesting machinery to several of the smaller growers in Washington County.

On Tuesday, he was working with Dick Farnsworth’s operation on U.S. Route 1 in Columbia Falls.

“It’s nice the market is on the rebound,” Grant said. “The yields are up, and the prices are up.”

Down East growers, most of them small family operations, are getting as much as 38 cents per pound – up from last year’s price of 25 cents. In the 2000 and 2001 seasons, Maine growers were getting just 20 cents per pound.

Down East farmers number just a dozen among the state’s 35 growers, according to Charles Alexander, cranberry specialist with University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

But landwise, the Washington County growers account for 84 percent of the state’s 260 acres in cranberry production.

The three largest producers in Washington County are Cherryfield Foods, with 111 acres in Cherryfield; the Passamaquoddy Tribe’s Northeastern Blueberry Co., with 19 acres in Columbia Falls; and Jasper Wyman and Son, with 16 acres in Deblois.

Maine’s first commercial cranberry beds were planted in 1989 as part of a national response to cranberry shortages and correspondingly high prices in the late 1980s. Grant, for one, can recall earning as much as 83 cents per pound in 1998 or 1999.

But soon after, excess supply brought a drop in market prices. Federal quotas restricted growers through the 2001 season, allowing them to sell only 65 percent of their historic average sales to processors.

Maine growers were exempted because the industry is still maturing here. A hearing in Bangor in May 2001, with testimony from local farmers, brought about that bit of good news for the Maine marketplace.

Now, national restrictions are off, and market prices and acreage are up again.

The Wyman bogs produced 205,000 pounds last year. This year, said Tamara Parker, the company’s cranberry manager, Wyman production fell slightly short of last year’s numbers.

“This year was not as good as last year,” Parker said. “But that’s part of business. This year in general, the color was good, but for us, we had some rot and other problems.”

A company best known for a 100-plus year history in blueberry production, Wyman experienced its fourth year harvesting cranberries. Wyman sells much of its cranberry products to restaurant suppliers.

With just 5 acres of bogs in Aurora, Kathy LaPlant drives an hour and 20 minutes each way from her Princeton home in hopes of a strong crop. This was LaPlant’s second year for a wet harvest, which yielded about 55,000 pounds. She has already delivered her harvest to buyer Wyman.

Last year, the same bogs yielded just 16,000 pounds for LaPlant.

“None of us really expect to get rich on this,” LaPlant said. “And if it hadn’t gone better for us this season, my company would have considered giving it up.”

The final production numbers for the season won’t be known for another month, said Armstrong, who this week sent surveys to all of Maine’s cranberry growers. But overall, he expects a slight increase in the 20,000 barrels that Maine delivered last year.

Cranberries are sold in 100-pound barrels. As recently as 2000, Maine’s cranberry harvest totaled only 9,021 barrels.