Bitter harvest 

Squeezed by plummeting prices, over production, New England's cranberry farmers face bleak future

By AMANDA MILKOVITS

Providence Journal Staff Writer

10/15/00 MIDDLEBOROUGH -- Early-morning mist rises like smoke off the cranberry bogs behind the Browns' home.

Betty Brown gazes out the kitchen window, her mind racing ahead to the day's harvest. Some of the 38 acres of bogs are being flooded so the ripe berries will float up for picking. Others are already full of water, just waiting for Mrs. Brown and her crew to corral the berries and ship them out. She and her small crew are preparing for steady 12-hour days, every day, for three weeks to bring in the crop.

Nearly a lifetime of experience has taught her what needs to be done. She knows when the berries are ready for harvest and how high the water needs to rise on the bogs to raise the berries off the vine. She knows how to gently guide long wooden boards on the water's surface around the bobbing berries and pull them into a tight circle for collection. She lovingly framed the first pay stub she earned for working the harvest -- $2 a day when she was 12 years old.

The 55-year-old woman is following the tradition she grew up with, one handed down from her father, and from his father, since they began Korpinen Cranberries back in 1939.

Her family tradition may be interrupted next year. The supply of cranberries nationwide has far exceeded the demand, sending the market into a freefall. Millions of barrels of cranberries from last year's harvest still haven't sold. Marketers, including the giant Lakeville cooperative Ocean Spray, of which Mrs. Brown is a member, are working desperately to increase the demand for cranberries and erode the surplus. But their efforts will be too late for this year's harvest. At current prices, growers are losing more than $22 a barrel to harvest their cranberries. Yet growers feel compelled to proceed with the harvest in order to recoup at least some of their expenses.

They have to harvest this year. But some, like Mrs. Brown, are contemplating closing down their bogs next year and waiting until the market recovers.

"This could be the last one," Mrs. Brown says, grimacing. "We haven't made a final decision yet . . . because it's so hard emotionally. My grandfather started this, and to go poof!" -- she blows a kiss at the backyard bogs -- "too bad. . ."

She knows how to get the most from her bogs. Now, she's learning about cutting back. The surplus from last year's crop forced the U.S. Department of Agriculture to order cranberry growers to either cut their production or destroy an average of 15 percent of their crops. For Korpinen Cranberries, that means a harvest limit of 5,200 barrels. The rest of the crop, potentially hundreds of barrels, are destined for compost.

THERE WAS A TIME when the Korpinens lived off their bogs. They were full-time cranberry farmers, whose profits rose and fell according to the whims of Mother Nature and the market. That's not the case anymore: Mrs. Brown is a librarian and her husband, Hal, is a therapist. She runs the bogs that she shares with three cousins. He runs a Web site called the Cranberry Stressline, filled with cranberry news and ideas for farmers on coping with tough times.

Their day jobs will save the Browns and their bogs. Other small cranberry farmers are grabbing at second jobs to get through. They're negotiating with banks on mortgage payments. They're worrying about losing what they've worked to build. Some are talking about just selling it all, getting out and letting some developer march in and build expensive homes around the bogs. To raise some money this summer, Mrs. Brown allowed construction crews from the Big Dig to truck away gravel from her land -- and felt heartsick as the machines tore into a once-beautiful hill near the bogs.

There are about 1,200 growers in North America, 500 alone in Massachusetts, all anxiously watching the market. They control 37,000 acres of bogs in North America, including 14,400 acres in Massachusetts.

This market crisis is about money, but it's also a threat to New England history and family tradition.

Mrs. Brown glances out her kitchen windows again before heading out to the bogs. She wonders aloud what it would be like next year without a harvest.

FIVE YEARS AGO, cranberries were red gold. Cranberry farmers couldn't fail. Some people were expanding their bogs; others were jumping in on the hot market. It costs about $32 to produce a 100-pound barrel of cranberries. In those days, growers were earning anywhere from $60 to $80 a barrel, and the cranberry handlers were begging for more to meet a rising demand.

They shouldn't have been. In the background of the cries for increasing production were rumblings about a growing surplus.

Ocean Spray spokesman Chris Phillips says that then-CEO Jack Llewellyn saw it coming but that few believed him. The Lakeville-based growers cooperative was locked in competition with its Wisconsin rival, Northland Cranberries, which had left the cooperative to do business on its own in 1993. Both cooperatives were demanding more cranberries, and growers were obliging.

There's enough blame to go around for what happened next -- too many growers, too much bounty, and not enough marketing.

"I don't think many people thought it would fall this far, this fast," said Jere Downing, executive director of the Cranberry Institute.

Ocean Spray takes some of the blame. The cooperative is a giant in the juice aisle, still commanding the number one brand spot in bottled juices and taking in 20 cents of every retail dollar spent as it share.

But comfort at the top doesn't always translate into smart growth. When a 1994 Harvard study found that cranberry juice effectively battled women's urinary tract infections, Ocean Spray didn't trumpet the findings. The cooperative was uncomfortable with "over-medicating" the product, Phillips said. The good medical news was shifted aside -- even though, when findings trickled out, it resulted in a 10-percent increase in cranberry consumption.

Then 1995 and 1996 brought back-to-back bumper crops and more growers leaping into the act because of the high prices. The juice aisles became crowded with other drink products, challenging Ocean Spray's market share.

And the market came tumbling down.

Growers who once commanded $60 to $80 a barrel for cranberries in the mid-1990s were getting just $20 a barrel in 1998. Then the price dropped again, and continued falling to current estimates of $10-$11.

The cranberry crop forecast for this year nationwide is for 5.84 million barrels, an 8-percent decrease from last year. In Massachusetts, the USDA is forecasting 1.83 million barrels for this year's harvest, a 3-percent decrease from the previous year.

The big cranberry rivals last month teamed up to ask the federal government for $20 million in direct cash payments and $30 million to buy cranberry products for school meal programs. The Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture is helping local growers develop business plans, granting $20,000 to $40,000 to growers who promise not to develop their land for five to 10 years.

Ocean Spray, easily the biggest player in the cranberry market, has made some changes. The cooperative brought in new managers, such as CEO Rob Hawthorne from Pillsbury, COO Randy Papadellis from Welch's, and vice president David Williams from The Quaker Oats Co. It cut the board of directors from 25 members to 11, sliced $76 million out of the operations budget, and is coming out with a new marketing plan featuring a revised label and juice bottles next year.

"There's absolute confidence that we're on the right track," Phillips said. "The qualifier is, there is a large sacrifice on the part of the growers."

Ocean Spray is predicting a two- to five-year market turnaround. That's a long time to keep a farm going without a profit. It takes four years just to nurse cranberry vines to produce a decent harvest. Now, there's talk that about 30 percent of farmers will flood their bogs during the bloom next year, forcing the cranberry buds to die and effectively putting the bog "to sleep." Whether those bogs will bounce back after a year or two in hibernation is a question that few can answer.

"There's good indications that if certain preventive acts are taking place that the vines will survive," said Downing. "We know the bog won't die out, but how productive it will be in two or three years after being idled down, nobody really knows about that."

This isn't the first time the cranberry industry has faced problems. It crashed in the 1940s and again in 1959, when growers dumped their crops after a cancer scare erupted over a pesticide that some may have used on the bogs. The early 1970s saw a surplus of cranberries, and prices plummeted.

Clark Griffith has lived through all the market crashes, and at 68, not much scares this cranberry farmer from Carver. He saw times in the 1940s when his father couldn't afford to pay him for his harvest work, and again in the 1970s, when he made his own equipment with a $20 welding torch because he couldn't afford to buy new.

"We have a whole generation of cranberry growers who've never been through bad times," Griffith said. "They've only known the best of times."

Still, he concedes, modern agriculture makes it harder for cranberry farmers to walk away. There's a different investment in bogs now than there was in the 1940s and '50s, from equipment and irrigation, to pesticides and fertilizers. Since he bought his father's share of the business in the early 1980s, Griffith estimated that he's invested about $500,000 in running the bogs.

He's got a pension and a timber business to get him through this market crash. But he worries about other small growers who haven't accepted that agricultural life includes troubled times.

"A lot of people are really baffled by this whole thing and trying to find a way out of it," Griffith said. "Some have not accepted it, and that's a scary thing."

NINE A.M. feels like noon as the sun shoots through the red and orange-tinged leaves on the trees surrounding the bogs at Korpinen Cranberries. The mist has burned off, and a hawk cries overhead as Mrs. Brown sloshes into a water-filled bog in chest-high waders.

She tugs a rope tied to a long wooden board, called a bin board, in the water, guiding it along the edges of the bog. Crew members Ed Lydon and Stoyan Iordanov hustle as they link more bin boards together, forming a floating cranberry corra.

As Mrs. Brown pulls the train of linked bin boards, Tim DeMoranville sweeps stray cranberries off the shore and into the inner circle with a "paddle" that resembles a push broom with a flat board end. After sweeping the berries and forming the bin boards in a circle, DeMoranville hops back in the farm's truck to check the water pumps at other bogs and see how close they were to harvesting.

BITE INTO a cranberry fresh from a bog and your mouth puckers like you're sucking a lemon. The tart juice snaps at your tongue, and the berry crunches like an apple.

The ripe red berries are about the size of grapes, with small seeds clustered in their white center. Sunlight turns the skins glowing red, while berries hidden under leaves remain white, but just as tart.

They're among the few native North American fruits, including Concord grapes and blueberries. Unlike those fruits, however, fresh cranberries seem to bite back when they're eaten.

Like their growers, the bog-grown berries are hardy survivors. Their vines thrive in acidic soil and low temperatures, conditions that would ruin other crops. In fact, dismayed growers say they can't plant a more profitable crop now because cranberry bogs will support nothing else.

The berries have been a part of American history since before the settlers arrived. Native Americans used the berries for dyes and poultice, and mashed them with deer meat to make pemmican, a long-lasting survival cake. American sailors ate them for vitamin C to ward off scurvy in the era of sailing ships; and soldiers in World War II ate products made of dehydrated cranberries for the same reason.

Recipes using cranberries go back to the 1700s, perhaps earlier if legend is true that cranberries were served at the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Cranberries have been used in pies, sauces and breads, but it wasn't until the late 1930s when the cranberry juice cocktail was introduced onto the mass market, by Cranberry Canners, later renamed Ocean Spray. By the early 1960s, the cooperative created the first juice blend, Cranapple, and heavily marketed its improved cranberry cocktail. Those juices built the juice aisle and made cranberries a prime commodity.

For a while. These days, the juice aisle is crammed with other brands and other juice or sports drinks. To get rid of the surplus, cranberry handlers are anxiously looking for other ways to market the berries. This time, they're ready to exploit the health benefits of cranberries.

Dr. James Joseph, who lives in the heart of cranberry country in Plymouth, is one of the scientists trying to unlock the secrets of the tart little berries.

The chief of the neuroscience lab at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutritional Research Center on Aging, at Tufts University, has just acquired a grant to study how the elements in cranberries may affect aging of the brain. His previous work concluded that blueberries contain compounds that may reverse short-term memory loss and forestall other effects of aging. He'll use that same model to find out whether certain compounds in cranberries increase anti-oxidants in the human body to also help fight the stresses of aging.

Cranberry handlers all over the nation are funding studies like Joseph's and eagerly anticipating the results, expected by early next year. This is the first time the Cranberry Institute is funding these kinds of studies, teaming up with the Wisconsin cranberry boards. The organization usually focuses on better crop production, "but that's not what the industry needs right now," executive director Downing said ruefully.

Whether these studies and heavy promotion will make all things cranberry a hot commodity -- and bring down the surplus -- all "depends on the public's appetite for cranberries," Downing said.

Joseph knows the work he's doing could help save his neighbors' livelihoods -- and protect the land around him. Property in Plymouth County, where most of the bogs are, is an attractive commodity. People can't build on wetlands, but they can build on the land around the bogs.

A farmer facing losing everything or selling some of the property to get out of a financial hole has tough decisions to make.

"It's very scary because you can not only lose your property, you can lose your house," said Kirby Gilmore, president of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers Association and owner of 35 acres of bogs in South Carver. "If this doesn't turn around, this could be the end of it."

Two years ago, bogs sold for $40,000 an acre, Gilmore said. These days, they're worth about $5,000 to $10,000 an acre -- and growers lose money with the harvest.

"This is what happens in agriculture. I don't think anyone should be surprised it happened," Gilmore said. "But in agriculture, things can turn around."

IT TAKES Betty Brown and her crew less than an hour to corral the bright red and white cranberries in a tight circle of bin boards in one of the bogs. All that's left to do is drive over The Rig -- a contraption that her uncle and father made that vacuums up the cranberries, filters out the twigs and too-small berries, and shoots out the rest into a trailer bed to be hauled to Ocean Spray.

This small curved bog, one from Mrs. Brown's grandfather's time, is still faithfully producing cranberries.

Berries that no one wants.

Iordanov scoops up a passle of cranberries from the bog, shakes out the water and dumps them into a white plastic shopping bag.

Hal Brown hands over the bag, heavy with about 21/2 gallons of berries.

"Here," he says, "this used to be worth something."

For more about cranberry farming, from information on the state of the industry to products and recipes, browse selected Web sites at:

http://projo.com/news/cranlinks.htm/