Bitter Times in Cranberry Bogs

Aug. 25 -- The business of growing cranberries is running low on juice.

An enterprise that for decades provided a nice living for hundreds of families, mostly in small coastal towns in the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest, now is a ticket to the poorhouse.

A barrel of cranberries that costs $35 to $45 to produce will certainly fetch less than half that this fall. That’s because there’s already too much of the stuff harvested last year and not yet sold, as much as 80 percent of what the world wants in an entire year. What’s left of last year’s crop now goes for $17 a barrel, and “everyone expects things to get worse before they get better,” says Aubrey Davis, who tracks cranberry production for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So producers — particularly the family growers tending bogs of 15 to 50 acres — are facing an excruciating choice: Do they tend their crops this year and sustain another loss, or do they sell out?

Too Much of a Good Thing

“It’s tough, watching your income go from making a decent living to barely making enough to pay for chemicals, let alone pay your employees, and not knowing if the crisis is going to end in a year, or two or three,” says Hal Brown.

Brown is a social worker who operates the online Cranberry Stressline, a source of news and opinion about Ocean Spray, the Lakeland, Mass., cooperative of growers. Brown and his wife, Betty, a librarian, grow cranberries on 38 acres in Middleborough, Mass. “The feeling is that the last one standing is going to make it,” Brown says. “If people have outside jobs, maybe they can hang on.” Whether families like the Browns decide to tough it out or get out depends in large part on their faith in Ocean Spray’s ability to bring demand back in balance with supply. Ocean Spray is the nation’s biggest producer of cranberries, with 1999 revenues of $1.36 billion, about 800 growers and some 70 percent of production. But competitors, including Wisconsin-based Northland Cranberries Inc., are in the same predicament. It’s a mess, by and large, of the industry’s own making.