Poor blueberry harvest drives up prices

Back-to-back subpar harvests have diminished stocks of frozen Maine wild blueberries, sending commercial users scurrying for berries and driving prices to record highs.

“I’ve got people calling me asking for berries and saying ‘I’ll pay anything,”‘ said Ed Flanagan, president of Jasper Wyman & Sons in Milbridge. “But they can’t get them at any price.”

Although official figures for the 2005 harvest will not be available until next year, David Bell, executive director of the Maine Wild Blueberry Commission, said it appears the harvest was better than last year’s, but still below the five-year average of 75 million pounds. Earlier industry estimates pegged the crop at 70 million pounds.

The 2004 harvest was “disastrous,” Bell said, yielding just 46 million pounds, the worst harvest since 1991.

Cold, wet weather in May delayed blooms on the plants, hampered pollination and created ideal conditions for disease. Flanagan blamed at least part of the problem on the lack of aerial spraying this year. Faced with lawsuits from environmental groups, both Wyman’s and Cherryfield Foods, the two largest wild blueberry growers in the state, chose to halt aerial spraying of blueberry fields this year.

“That hurt the small growers hardest,” he said.

Without Wyman and Cherryfield Foods’ economies of scale, the small growers were unable to treat their fields adequately and lost a considerable amount of their crop to disease, Flanagan said. Although some growers reported good harvests this year, Bell said they did not balance out the losses.

Larger companies such as Wyman’s chose to spray using boom sprayers, but, according to Flanagan, tires on those rigs damaged the crop. He estimated tire damage alone ruined 6 percent of the crop on company fields.

The shortage of berries, however, has driven market prices higher than ever before.

“That’s resulted in record high prices we’ve paid out to growers this year,” Flanagan said. “But that’s not much help to a small grower who lost 50 percent of his crop.”

Market prices have soared to “historically high” levels, reaching between $1.87 and $1.95 a pound at the end of November, according to the Food Institute Report, a New Jersey publication that tracks commodity prices nationwide.

That is well above the market price of $1.25 at this time last year and above the normal average price of about $1 a pound.

The high prices have not lessened the demand for the berries. Most of the wild blueberries grown in Maine and Canada are frozen and sold mainly to customers who use them as ingredients in other products, especially baked goods.

“Our customers invest a lot in planning, packaging and promotion,” Bell said. “That’s a big investment, and they count on having the berries. If they can’t get it, it’s not good.”

The shortage also means that fewer berries are available for use in new product development, Bell said.

“When we do have a good year, there will be fewer markets to sell into,” he said.

Wyman’s has had to change the way it works with its customers because of the shortage of berries, Flanagan said.

“We’ve had to pull back from some distribution points we use, and we’ve had to limit the quantity we sell to our customers,” he said.

The danger, he said, is that the high prices and lack of berries will discourage customers from using wild blueberries in their products.

“We don’t want people to change their formulas,” Flanagan said. “If they can’t get blueberries for their muffins, they may sell more corn muffins or chocolate chip muffins. If they take the blueberries out of their muffins, will we be able to get the blueberries back into them? That’s the risk we have.”

For now, though, the demand remains high, driven in part by continuing research promoting the health benefits of wild blueberries.

“We’ll be in good shape if we can get our supplies back,” Flanagan said. “The demand is as robust as any business I’ve been in.”