Although this year’s cranberry harvest was good, prices were unusually low, making for a “depressing” market, according to a cranberry specialist with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.
“The price was … horrendous for water-harvested berries,” said Charles Armstrong, who works with the extension.
He said about 84 percent of all cranberries in Maine are wet harvested, which involves flooding the bog and collecting the ripe berries when they float to the surface.
Armstrong said the “break-even point” for wet harvesting requires getting about 35 to 40 cents per pound for the berries. This year, however, the price dipped to between 12 and 20 cents a pound.
In contrast, at $1.50 to $2.50 per pound, prices were good for dry harvested berries, which are picked by hand or raked mechanically.
But only about 16 percent of Maine’s crop is dry harvested because the market for fresh whole cranberries is relatively small compared to the market for processed cranberries, which are wet harvested for making juice and cranberry sauce.
Although Cherryfield Foods harvested all of its fields, some growers preferred to cut their losses and not harvest this year because of the low prices, Armstrong said.
Armstrong said about five of the approximately 30 cranberry growers in Maine declined to harvest a total of about 25 acres.
The biggest costs in cranberry farming are associated with trucking and processing the fruit, he said. Fuel and manpower are other costs avoided by not harvesting.
Prices were much higher for organically grown and dry harvested cranberries than for their nonorganic counterparts. Organic dry harvested berries were going for as much as $5 a pound this year. Even though organic farmers have a lower yield, they make more money because of the higher prices for organic products, Armstrong said.
Overall, Armstrong estimates Maine’s cranberry farms produced about 2 million pounds of fruit this year, worth an estimated $808,000.
