Cranberries: Bogs to Bags to Bellies

 

I recently wrote about common crackers. Millions of Americans are about to shovel in an equally unpretentious food and I don’t mean the fan-tailed meleagris, aka/ the turkey. I’m talking about its bright red plated sidekick: cranberries.

 

 

 

 

This fall I knocked off a bucket list item by venturing to Chatham on Cape Cod to see and hear all about the cranberry harvest. Suffice it to say I had little idea about the process or the challenges facing growers. My defense is that I grew up in dairy and mixed farming country; cows and wheat I know, cranberries not so much. I’m not sure I ever saw fresh cranberries as a kid; for all I knew, they grew inside cans or muffins.

 

 

 

Like farmers of all kinds, cranberry producers work hard and are at the mercy of the weather and the market. Cranberries have to be tended constantly despite the fact they grow in “bogs.” Too much or too little rain wreaks havoc and the picking season is maddeningly short–pretty much October to the week before Thanksgiving. Then it’s pray for a good price. The bulk of Massachusetts cranberries are sold to two large firms: Ocean Spray or Quebec processor Fruit d’Or. Don’t want to accept what they offer? Good luck with all those berries.

 

 

 

Sixty-one-year-old Dave Ross of Little Scoop Cranberry Farm hires help for the harvest, but he’s essentially a one-man operation. In the company of Emily and friends Dominique and Tess we toured Dave’s property and got the lowdown. You’ve probably seen pictures of berries floating on ponds. I foolishly thought cranberries grew in water like some mutant form of red rice. I knew they ripened on bushes, but I was thinking something along the lines of tall, watery domesticated blueberries. I should have been thinking about wild blueberries–the sort that grow on the surface and are seldom higher than a foot or so high. 

 

 

 

The water is the nearly last step, not the first. Before that happens, a cranberry bog isn’t very picturesque; it’s a big messy shrubland with weeds and other vegetation poking out. Any standing water comes from Mother Nature, not human hands. The berries ripen and look a bit like rounded vermilion coffee beans. When they blush red, it’s time to turn on the taps.

 

 

Here's where I was really clueless. All those aerial shots of cranberries suggest they float in a deep lake, so I assumed boats were somehow involved in knocking the berries off their stems. What was I thinking!? Some kind of weed whacker for fruit? Actually, cranberry ponds are shallow enough that in ye olden days farmers donned waders, carried snapping scoops through the water, and plucked the berries from the vines. A few hobby farmers still do that if there are growing only for personal use.

 

Today, most cranberries are harvested by something that looks like a Rube Goldberg lawn mower crossed with an egg beater. They are driven through the water and rotating blunt blades knock the berries into the water. Because cranberries have four air pockets in which the seeds are held, the berries rise to the surface. Cranberry dogs then round up the berries and put them in a corral. Oh wait! I’m wrong about that. Actually, booms are used to contain them and it depends on how meticulous the farmer gets in collecting them. Those that are not gathered help reseed the area. Those wicked cool crimson seas pictured on the Internet are the contained berries that get vacuumed into the back of trucks through wide hoses; no aquatic Roombas need apply. 

 

 

 

 

Then berries are cleaned, sorted, and sent to the distributor while farmers spend the holiday season hoping for a nice check that covers growing costs, hired labor, and leaves a bit of profit behind. Soon, it’s first-and-ten/do it again as they prep for the next year’s crop. Let’s be frank:  New England cranberry growers are at a metaphorical crossroad. Hybrid berries increase their yield, but can old-style bogs compete with the enormous square plantation-style production of Wisconsin, which is now the largest producer in the nation?

 I hope so. Dave’s farm is a throwback, but it’s colorful in ways no industrial farm can be. I gained appreciation for how something as unpresuming as a cranberry is a labor of love. I shall ponder this each time I bite into a muffin or see a red berried puddle on my Thanksgiving plate.

 

Rob Weir

 [Note: All photos are mine except the two harvester machines and old-fashioned scoop.]