Harvest Time at a Cranberry Farm

How This Fruit Gets From the Bog to the Grocery Store

Oct 13, 2009 Cheryl Kraynak

Local farmers, in cooperation with a major commercial processor, get fresh cranberries from farm to market each autumn in a $1.6 billion annual business.

Cranberries, a fruit native to North America, grow on vines in sandy bogs in the wetlands of Massachusetts and other states such as New Jersey, Delaware, Michigan, Washington, Oregon and Wisconsin. The fruit grows in parts of Canada, as well, namely British Columbia and Quebec.

Water and Sand Used for Protection and Fertilizer

Cranberries grow best where there are cold winters and plenty of rainfall in the summer. A sprinkler system in the bog is not only good for irrigation, but for frost protection in the spring and fall. Additionally, by flooding the bogs in winter, the farmer can protect the vines from harsh winds and frigid temperatures.

Sand is used as an effective way to enhance the yield, as well. A sanding machine is used to apply up to an inch of sand atop the ice when flooded bogs have frozen. As the ice melts, the sand settles slowly around the vines, which adds nutrients and acts as a natural pesticide. The vines flower in June, and new berries develop all summer. In late September and into October, when the berries have ripened, the farms begin their harvest.

Methods for Harvesting and Grading Cranberries

Before mechanical harvesters, farmers used hand scoops in a laborious effort to gather cranberries from the field. In the 1920s the Bailey Separator was patented, a machine that separated the good berries from the bad ones by the way they bounced.

A conveyor belt moved the berries to the top of a wooden separating platform, where they then fell through the apparatus, the freshest and firmest berries bouncing down properly through the separator, and the lesser quality berries falling flat. New technology today at the Ocean Spray company uses air and lasers to grade and separate the berries.

Some growers, such as Flax Pond Farms in Carver, Massachusetts, continue the dry harvesting method. Dry harvesting brings the freshest berries to market. A harvester walks the bog using a mechanical picker, which rakes the cranberry vines and deposits the berries into a burlap bag attached to the back of the machine.

The full bags are then hauled by hand to plastic crates placed around the field, and the fruit is dumped inside. To keep vehicles out of the bog, the farmers stack the crates and hire a helicopter to lift them onto a long, flatbed trailer parked nearby, which later transports the product to the Ocean Spray processing plant.

Farms that do not dry-harvest their cranberries gather them by wet harvesting, which is a much quicker method, first developed in the 1960s. Water is pumped into the bog to flood it to about 18 inches deep. The cranberries are removed from the vines using mechanical water reels, and the cranberries float to the surface. They are then corralled and loaded onto trucks, which transport the fruit to the processing plant.

Foreign Markets Help Sustain the Cranberry Industry

More than 600 cranberry farmers and about 50 grapefruit growers own Ocean Spray, Inc., a cooperative which holds more than 70 percent of the market share. Crops produced at farms in Cape Cod, for example, are processed nearby at Ocean Spray headquarters in Lakeville-Middleboro, MA. Many farm owners, some of whom have converted their fields to organic crops, sell their product directly to visitors at their farms and grocers in their own community.

Only in the past decade has a foreign market for cranberries developed in earnest. On October 23, 2007, USA Today published “Sales of Cranberries Increase Overseas,” an article by AP writer John Hartzell, which revealed that sales of cranberries outside the U.S. have exploded since 1999.

That is when the Cranberry Marketing Committee, formed in 1962 to maintain the supply/demand balance of the product domestically, began promoting to foreign markets. According to the article, foreign sales were 27 percent of the market in 2006, and Ocean Spray has seen sales of up to $400 million annually from 80 different countries.

A visit to a cranberry farm in the autumn is one way for people to develop appreciation for the labor that goes into the growing and harvesting of this native berry that has become a staple in the U.S. diet, and which is quickly becoming a staple in the diets of people in other countries.

Sources:

• “Cranberries.” Encyclopedia.com. <www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2896900032.html>
• “Flax Pond History.” <www.flaxpondfarms.com/history.html>
• Hartzell, John. “Sales of Cranberries Increase Overseas.” USA Today, 23 October 2007.
• “History of Cranberries.” Cape Cod Cranberry Growers' Association.
• Pereira, Joseph and McKay, Betsy. “Cranberry Crunch? Bounty of the Bog Gets Pricier.” The Wall Street Journal, 21 November, 2007.

The copyright of the article Harvest Time at a Cranberry Farm in International Trade is owned by Cheryl Kraynak. Permission to republish Harvest Time at a Cranberry Farm in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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