Low price for cranberries keeps some Maine farmers from harvesting crop
Flickr / Liz West
Maine cranberry growers didn’t harvest about an eighth of the state’s total acres devoted to the crop because of unusually low prices.
The Bangor Daily News reported that the price for wet harvested berries, a method that involves flooding the bog and collecting ripe berries that float to the surface, was at times less than half the price needed for farmers to break even. About 84% of all cranberries in Maine are wet harvested.
Charles Armstrong, a cranberry specialist with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, told the BDN that the break-even point for wet harvesting requires farmers to receive about 35 to 40 cents per pound for cranberries, but the price was around 12 and 20 cents a pound this year.
Prices were better for dry harvested berries, but the market for processed cranberries, wet harvested for making juice and cranberry sauce, is much larger. Armstrong estimated that cranberry farms in Maine produced about 2 million pounds this year, worth an estimated $808,000.
About five of the roughly 30 cranberry growers in Maine didn’t harvest a total of about 25 acres, an eighth of the state’s 200 acres devoted to cranberry farming.
About half of the state’s cranberry acres are owned by Cherryfield Foods Inc., a division of Nova Scotia-based Oxford Frozen Foods Ltd. in Nova Scotia. Cherryfield Foods, which owns about 100 acres of cranberries in Maine, mostly in Washington County, harvested all of its acres this year.
A spokesman for Cherryfield Foods told the BDN that even though the company doesn’t sell its cranberries to wholesalers, it was still affected by the low prices.
Maine’s cranberry production represents about half of 1 percent of cranberry production nationwide, but in 2013, Maine still ranked sixth in the nation in production behind Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington.
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