Wyman buys Guptill land, facilities

MILBRIDGE – Jasper Wyman and Sons has purchased the land and facilities of Guptill Farms Inc., a move that will add approximately 1,000 acres of wild blueberry land to the company’s holdings and could result in an increase in employment opportunities at Wyman’s.

The sale was conducted last month at the Portland law offices of Verrill Dana as the result of a foreclosure order against Guptill filed in September in Washington County Superior Court.

Although Guptill’s financial problems dated back almost a decade, Wyman’s involvement began in 2000 when the company guaranteed a $2.5 million Guptill loan. Wyman had to pay the bank when Guptill defaulted on that loan.

There was no third party buyer involved in the sale, and Wyman “bid its claim” to acquire the property, according to Roger Clement, a Portland attorney who represented J/W Land, an affiliate of Jasper Wyman and Sons. The acquisition of the property will satisfy a part of the money due the company, Clement said.

“We did not set out for this to end this way,” Wyman President and CEO Ed Flanagan said Monday. “We would have preferred that Mr. Guptill had continued to function.”

Flanagan declined to discuss the exact purchase price, but said the overall cost to Wyman was much higher than the $2.5 million.

“We capped what we had to pay to the receiver in negotiations,” Flanagan said in a telephone interview from his office in Topsham, Mass. “The loan was $2.5 million, but there was interest and the cost of litigation. The gross value was quite a bit higher than that.”

The sale includes approximately 2,900 acres in four Washington County towns, as well as the company’s processing plant and freezer in Wesley. Of that 2,900 acres, about 1,000 acres is blueberry land, but Flanagan stressed that the land has had some problems in the past and the company is still unsure whether they will be able to harvest berries from it or not.

The problems date back to the 1990s when Guptill Farms claimed that a popular fertilizer-herbicide mixture had killed blueberry plants on about 400 acres of its blueberry land in Wesley. Nothing has been done to the land for a number of years, and alders have grown over much of the land, Flanagan said.

“We hope to find as much as 1,000 acres of blueberry land,” he said. “We may be able to get more blueberries off of 200 acres of good land than we can off that land. We just don’t know yet.”

The 1,000 acres would be a substantial addition to the company’s land holdings in the state. Wyman owns approximately 26,000 acres in Maine; about 7,000 acres of that is blueberry land. The company also owns some blueberry land in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

The market for wild blueberries has been strong in recent years and an additional source of berries would be welcome, Flanagan said, but it will take time before they know whether the land is productive.

“Clearly the demand is there,” he said. “I’d like to have the blueberries off that field next year when the demand is high. We don’t know what the demand will be in a few years.”

The company will use the cold storage facility in Wesley, but Flanagan said the company probably would not use the production plant.

“That was not a very good production line when it was operating, and I don’t think we’ll ever use it again,” he said. “The cold storage facility is quite valuable.”

The company already has erected a 32-foot Wyman sign on the side of the building and, in fact, has blueberries in the freezer. Before the litigation began, Wyman leased space in the freezer from Guptill, and after the foreclosure when the property went into receivership, the company continued that arrangement with the receiver. The building has a capacity of about 6 million pounds of blueberries, and Flanagan said it is full now.

“We will continue to try to build a Wyman’s farm staff at that location,” he said. “It is an investment; we have much work to do before the blueberries come in, and that work is not going to be done by pixies. It’ll be done by good old strapping farm workers. So we do anticipate some employment needs.”

Flanagan said the facility might employ four to six people.

Jasper Wyman and Sons is a privately owned corporation that has been in business since 1874. The company has headquarters in Milbridge and production facilities in Cherryfield, Deblois and Prince Edward Island.