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Cranberry Culture
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Dear One Absent This Long While
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Feature
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Cranberry Culture
For its researchers, the tart state fruit has become a way of life
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Karen Skolfield ’98G
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IN WINTER, THE CRANBERRY BOGS resemble skating rinks more than fallow fields, the plants insulated just below, their leaves still red from harvesting and cold-weather dormancy. By the time the bog thaws and is allowed to drain and its flowers pollinate, the hard green fruit filling out and plumping to red, a full six months will have passed, a half year of bog growth and hard work by the scientists at the UMass Amherst Cranberry Station in East Wareham.
With the harvest as the pinnacle of the season’s work, it’s hard not to cringe a little as Carolyn DeMoranville ’76G and Hilary Sandler walk through the cranberry bog, fruits the size of thumbs popping beneath the weight of footsteps.
But this is no English cutting garden and there are no pampered plants here. Whole sections of the bog, an integral part of the cranberry station, are sacrificed every year to science. Weeds are given free reign in one area. Another section is allowed to succumb to the dreaded fruit rot and suffers up to 95 percent crop loss. Other sections are given over to experiments with road salt, parasitic plants, pruning, and controlled flooding for pest control. The 11 acres of cranberries still constitute a farm but it serve the purposes of science as much as the harvest.
That harvest is fast approaching. At my first visit to the station, it’s just a week away, explains DeMoranville, director of the station. The bog that we walk through is set below the plane of the land around us and is surrounded by deep ditches, a perfect setup for a wet harvest, a colorful, eye-catching autumn event.
Beautiful as the harvest is, here it means the end to much of the season’s data collecting for the five scientists and their students who work here year-round. That means scientists such as Sandler are frantically gathering weed seeds for her research in weed control.
Plant pathologist Frank Caruso ’75G hunches in the field with the mechanical scoop, a short plastic stool, and a paper bag. He samples from a field of Crowley cranberries for fruit rot percentages. Caruso looks as if he’s been in this pose for days, and he admits that during harvest, he routinely works 14-hour days regularly. I ask him about his research, if he actually likes cranberries. Not even glancing up from his work, he shakes his head: “Don’t ask me that right now.” Short flags mark the sections that still need to be sampled; those flags seem legion in number, stretching to a cranberry horizon.
The American cranberry, a relative of the blueberry, was first cultivated in the early 1800s, in Massachusetts, so it’s fitting that the only research station devoted exclusively to this perfectly tart fruit is ours. Like any plant, the cranberry is plagued by pests: “The crop evolved here and the pests evolved right along with it,” DeMoranville says. Though the average person might never have encountered any of the 15 major cranberry pests such as Acrobasis vaccinii, the cranberry fruit worm, it’s very likely that the 300-plus growers in the state have, and they’re continuously searching for ways to decrease bugs, weeds, and fungus while increasing yields.
Hence the station. The land was purchased in 1910 by the state with urging from the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers Association. The bog was planted, and it’s been poked, prodded, infested, treated, harvested, and studied by generations of scientists ever since. In the early years, the station was a joint university and federal research effort; now it’s strictly a UMass Amherst endeavor with outside funding. The vines that bear fruit today are largely the same vines planted nearly a century ago.
It finally occurs to me, sometime during my second trip to the station, that the bog and its surrounding land and nearby buildings constitute the largest lab in which I’ve ever set foot. Unlike other labs, though, this one marks the seasons, and the autumn finale constitutes a literal opening of the floodgates.
By the time I return in October, the bog has been flooded with water that goes to the kneecaps except for deep drainage ditches and the occasional odd and unpredictable hole. The vines are visible just beneath with their bright jewels of fruit.
Local companies appreciate what the station provides so they harvest the fruit as an in-kind donation. A.D. Makepeace Co. harvests this bog; Cranberry Grower Service harvests the station’s second bog, in Myles Standish State Forest, which is grown almost entirely for production. From the East Wareham bog, they anticipate about 1,100 pounds of fruit, an amount I find startling from plants only a few inches high, but DeMoranville tells me it’s low. “Compared to a commercial grower, that’s still not very exciting,” she says. “But we trample the place into the ground and don’t treat for fruit rot and let the weeds take over.”
The workers from A.D. Makepeace enter the bog with their water reels, affectionately nicknamed “egg beaters” and for good reason: the tractor-size machines jostle the fruit from the vine. Forty-five minutes later, the water’s surface is sea of red.
DeMoranville is pleased. “It’s a sign of a good crop to see berries so uniformly across the water.”
Tree swallows dart over the berries, swooping in for the spiders and other insects that have suddenly found their normal home a tad too moist.
“This is my favorite time of year,” DeMoranville says contentedly as she stands a foot from the bog’s edge. She’s been around cranberries her whole life; her first job, at age 10, was in her family’s cranberry bog. “All the field work is coming to a conclusion, the crop is in, we don’t have to worry about frost nights, we can take a deep breath… and who can complain about this weather?”
The scientists are looking forward to their first deep breath, which is still weeks away for some. The laboratories, within sight of the flooded bog, hum with the work of researchers, students, and a few volunteers. Other researchers are busy making the rounds of private bogs, rushing to stay ahead of the flooding schedule. On the first harvest day at the station, Sandler, who specializes in weeds and integrated pest management, works in a nearby as-yet-unflooded field owned by A.D. Makepeace. Along with research technician Joey Mason, she’s busy collecting the seeds of the dodder, a parasitic weed that weakens cranberry plants. “We need thousands and thousands of seeds to run our experiments,” Sandler says, as she and Mason laboriously stoop over the weeds and drop their miniscule seeds into buckets.
It’s not unusual for the station’s scientists and students to work in private bogs. Sandler tells me the station establishes a research presence at the farms of 20 to 30 growers per year, giving the scientists a chance to study a much wider range of growing conditions, cultivars, weeds, and pests. “We get to do some good science and some good local outreach,” Sandler says.
Entomologist Anne Averill ’85G, who is also a faculty member in UMass Amherst’s plant, soil and insect sciences department, agrees that the contact between scientists and growers is especially positive. “Our interactions with the growers are real. The USDA and the sustainable agriculture research program really look for this type of collaboration. And every time I see them, the growers are so positive. We make a difference and they acknowledge that.”
Caruso’s work during and after harvest is entirely in the lab. He apologizes for how busy he is: “I’m a little raspier now that I’ve been doing this for three and a half weeks,” he says, as he plies his forceps and moves berries in sets of five into plastic containers, part of an experiment to discover if a certain rot is becoming resistant to fungicides. Still, there’s the sense that he may come to like the cranberry again once the crush of the harvest has passed. “It’s the most fascinating fruit I’ve ever worked with,” he says. He interrupts his work for just a few moments and expounds on the historical lore of the cranberry, the uniqueness of the bogs and harvest, the resilience of the plant, the open space of the fields.
“I don’t think people realize what cranberry growing does for the open space,” he says. On average, every planted acre of cranberries is supported by three to four acres of surrounding wetlands and uplands, providing open space, wildlife habitat, and groundwater recharge in an area otherwise stressed from urbanization. “Development is the biggest threat to the industry,” he says, “and it’s my biggest fear. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
The harvest will continue for at least two days, with another crew slated to corral the berries, remove them from the bog, and truck them to Ocean Spray, the cooperative that purchases the station’s harvest. The profit from the sales makes the bog self-sustaining, ensuring that research will continue.
“Everything is research-based for us,” DeMoranville says. “We have a group that’s highly motivated—what better thing for a scientist than to work on a crop that’s not well understood? There are so many unanswered questions. What a perfect scenario for a scientist.”
After harvest, the research tends to evolve from data collection to data processing. Grant proposals are written. Peer-reviewed journal articles are polished. The scientists run grower meetings to discuss recent findings and develop questions for future research. The greenhouse is tended. Pests such as the cranberry weevil and the black-headed fireworm incubate in the station’s refrigerators, waiting to be studied.
Only the hardiest visit the dormant bogs in the wintertime, more to witness the hard freeze, the plants even tighter to the ground now, than for any research purpose. The bog is flooded from mid-December through February, and then the waters are allowed to recede. That’s when smells return to the almost-spring bog—the scents of soil and plants unfurling, a twitch of growth. The scientists have impressed upon me the complexity of the cranberry, yet some of it remains cyclical and elementary: Soon tiny pinkish blooms wash over the bog, and the bees come.
A BUSHEL OF BERRY FACTS
The name “cranberry” derives from the Pilgrims’ name for the fruit, “craneberry,” so called because the spring blossoms resemble the head and bill of a sandhill crane.
There are only three fruits native to
North America: blueberries, Concord
grapes, and cranberries.
Cranberries are farmed on 40,000 acres in the northern United States and Canada, with primary production in Wisconsin (16,000 acres), Massachusetts (13,000 acres), and
New Jersey (3,000 acres). The rest—about 8,000 acres—is largely in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia,
and Quebec.
Cash receipts to cranberry growers in Massachusetts in 2003 were $47,701,000,
based on 107,000 barrels of fresh sales and
1.299 million barrels of processed sales.
Of the approximately 1,000 cranberry growers in North America, 500 are in Massachusetts. Approximately 70 percent of these growers are small family farms with less than 20 acres of bog.
The cranberry crop contributes more than
$200 million in payroll to Massachusetts’s workers and employees about 5,500 people.
Most fresh cranberries are sold between October and Christmas, with the bulk of the crop selling by Thanksgiving. Fresh sales account for about 6 to 7 percent of all cranberries harvested. The rest are sold processed.
Statistics, history, and research findings come from The Cranberry Institute, the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association, the Cranberry Marketing Committee, and the UMass Cranberry Station. |
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Cranberry Culture
Cranberry Culture: more images
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