Blueberry output up 29% from 2002 Expert says this year to be ‘seller’s market’

ORONO – Maine’s wild blueberry industry got a boost Monday in the form of final figures for the 2003 harvest.

Maine’s growers produced 80.2 million pounds of the fruit last year, an increase of 29 percent from the 2002 output.

The details were released Monday by the New England Agricultural Statistics Service, a regional office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Concord, N.H.

The numbers sit well with David Yarborough, the University of Maine’s cooperative extension specialist for blueberries, even when compared with the two other blueberry harvests that Maine growers and processors look to.

Those competing figures are the production numbers for cultivated, high-bush blueberries primarily from Michigan and New Jersey, and for Canadian wild blueberries out of Atlantic Canada and Quebec.

Canadian wild blueberry production was at an all-time high in 2003 at 120.8 million pounds, Yarborough reported.

But the yield for cultivated berries was down at 187.7 million pounds, he said. The five-year average for cultivated blueberries is about 210 million pounds.

Yarborough likes Maine’s numbers this year, which allow for a “seller’s market.”

“The amount of blueberries out there, either wild or cultivated, has an effect on what the price will be based on supply and demand,” he said. “The Canadian crop was big, but the cultivated crop was down. It could have been worse for us if cultivated had a bumper crop, too.”

Maine’s wild blueberry crop in 2002 was 62.4 million pounds, according to industry statistics.

The unpredictability of how crops come together for harvest depends largely on August’s temperatures and precipitation, Yarborough said. Adequate rain makes the berries plumper.

Maine’s wild blueberry growers are sampled in June to provide preliminary estimates of how their acreage might turn out. Those numbers are used to provide a preliminary report at the end of July. Last year, the preliminary figure for 2003 was set at 80 million pounds, not far off at all from the year’s final figures.

Maine’s growers are now making preparations for the 2004 crop, which may be impacted by the price-fixing lawsuit that has troubled three processors and their lenders since the $56 million verdict in November.

This is the time of year for growers to arrange for beehives and pollination, which is ordinarily financed by the processors as a service. But with tightened cash on hand this year, processors may ask growers to pay for the cost of bringing bees into the fields up front, Yarborough said.

At a cost of about $60 per hive, using a couple of hives per acre, a grower with 10 acres would spend about $1,200 for bees in April.