Post harvest clean-up 2016

Posted on November 18, 2016 by stef

All of our harvest teams had a strong finish, and now we’re on to cleaning!

“Cleaning ditches, cleaning excess leaves from bogs, cleaning up everything from harvest. Grass, weeds, debris: all of it,” says COO Byran vonHahmann. “Then once that’s done, we’ll have a crew installing swan string.” Under the direction of Matt Giberson, our foremen are trying out some new equipment to help with some of debris cleanup.

“We’re trying out some new-to-us equipment that municipalities use for leaf and brush pick-up,” Bryan says. “When we harvest and gather off the same corner of the bog every year, all the leaves come to that corner and settle there. Those are hard to rake out of the vines, and then year after year they settle to the ground. Which means that eventually they’ll choke the vines out and kill them. With some bogs, especially the bigger ones, you end up with a lot and that space becomes significant. So the plan is to vacuum those areas right out. We tested it a couple of weeks ago and it worked really, really well to help us reclaim those corners and keep them healthy.”

At the same time, the crew is cleaning out the ditches inside the older bogs.

As far as our other post-harvest project, however: “There’s nothing new with swan string,” Bryan says. “We just have to get it done.”

Tundra swans are a tremendous annoyance to local growers due to their feeding habits. They are particularly fond of red root, a weed that competes with cranberry vines for nutrients. You might think that swans are a natural solution to the problem; unfortunately, when the swans fly in to feed, they not only tear out the red root, they also tear out vines and leave enormous holes that damage the beds themselves.

Since the swans are a protected species, growers have had to come up with a solution to keep them away from the crop. At Pine Island our team installs swan string. To start, the team places rebar in the ground along the longer sides of a bog, about every 75 feet. On the ends of the bog, the team walks it out and determines how many lines they’ll need to run lengthwise though the center.

Once the rods are laid out on the dam, a team of three to five people gets into the bog and walks the string across. Once the entire bog is strung, the team goes back in and puts up poles, which are used to keep the strings out of the water so that they don’t freeze. They’re placed in a checkered pattern, not necessarily on every line. The poles can either be cedar posts or recycled irrigation pipe. In addition to the recycling/environmental aspect, reusing the irrigation line is lighter and easier to handle.

The strings help keep the swans out of the bog by limiting the space available. “Swans are like a commercial airliner,” CEO Bill Haines says. “Having the strings up disrupts their attempt to both land and take off again.” Not all of the bogs are strung; our team maps them out where we have found red root and where the swans have been spotted.

Once all of this is done, our team will be ready for our next targets: sanding and the winter flood!

Harvest’s end – 2016

Posted on November 11, 2016 by stef

Harvest finished this week with a bang at Pine Island Cranberry, and we are all proud at what we’ve been able to accomplish this year: 32.6 million pounds of cranberries, with 1,278 acres harvested at an average of 255 barrels per acre!

“We started slow because we were chasing the color,” says manager Matt Giberson, “but by the end, we had all three teams going seven days a week and we brought in a lot of fruit. On our final three days we were sending over 1.5 million pounds of clean fruit per day to the receiving station, which is a record.” He says the three harvest teams did an incredible job. “It was a safe harvest, too; nobody got hurt. And Matt Stiles did great for his first year as a harvest team leader. His crew started the earliest, and it’s tough to be the guys who are going from early September all the way to the end when the berries just keep coming at you. Long hours, lack of sleep; it all gets to you after a while. But he did a fantastic job.”

CFO Joann Martin agrees: “24 bogs set records this year! Nadine #3 produced 523 barrels per acre this year, which is amazing.” She also credits the team for this year’s numbers as well as their meticulous attention to detail. “Mike [Guest] always does a great job with tracking the numbers at the packing house, and this year with the two bog side cleaners things are a little different. This was Vanessa’s second year working on the new equipment, and she did a phenomenal job keeping everything straight. Running the trucks out there isn’t always the easiest job but her attention to detail made all the difference.”

COO Bryan vonHahmann is already looking ahead: “Now that we have the yield results as well as the less fun numbers for things like rot and debris, we can start to build our analysis. We’ll look at what we did bed by bed, comparing it to our application records: what we applied, when, how much. We’ll also look at other activities like weeding, bees, and pollination, then try to determine improvements. For example, if we had one bed that was good but the one immediately next to it was weak, why? How do we improve the weaker bed? It’s a question of taking the large amount of data we have and turning it into something we can manage from, then systematically applying what we’ve learned on bog-by-bog basis.”

“Obviously we were really happy with the crop,” says CEO Bill Haines. “It was our second biggest crop ever, and third biggest in terms of barrels per acre, so I was really pleased with that. We’re pleased that our strategy of accelerating the renovation of our bogs is working; I think that’s the biggest impact we’ve had. The team worked really hard this year as always, and I’m really proud of the job that they did. And they deserve all of the credit for this crop. We have stuff to work on, and we have to continue to renovate; we had problems with quality and we’re not sure why. It’s probably weather related, but we’re going to work this winter to have a plan to improve on that. But the team did a great job.”

*Photos courtesy Nadine Haines.

A visit from NJ Young Farmers & Ranchers

Posted on October 28, 2016 by stef

Last Saturday, Pine Island Cranberry’s own Tim Bourgeois (who also has his own operation, Gaining Ground Farms) hosted the NJ Young Farmers & Ranchers group for a harvest tour. The group, which is part of the New Jersey Farm Bureau, often tours host farms throughout the state and tries to showcase their own members’ farms for meetings.

“We try to alternate tours at different operations to give our members a look at various agriculture commodities throughout the state,” Tim says. “It helps broaden our horizons and gives us a chance to do some networking. I wanted to show the younger folks different ag options throughout the state: the different ways to raise a crop as well as the all the crops to choose from. The bonus was being able to show off the pinelands and the cranberries and the harvest season!”

After lunch at the office, the group took an in-depth behind the scenes tour led by Tim and manager Matt Giberson that included both the standard push reels as well as the harrow, gathering with the traditional elevator, the packing house, the shop, and an up-close look at one of our big side cleaners. The group also had the opportunity to walk through both a young bog as well as an established bog that hadn’t been picked yet.

They took every opportunity to ask fantastic questions, and it was a wonderful chance for our team to speak with people who understand and share many of the same triumphs and challenges!

Shannon Oiler of Norz Hill Farm (better known as Scare Farm this time of year!) and chair of the NJ YF&R thought it was “really cool” to see the entire operation. “One of the things that Tim mentioned that correlated to what we often tell people at our farm is you guys need 10 acres of trees for every one acre of bog. Being that we were a dairy farm and now agritourism, people still ask about cows. Rule of thumb for cows was one acre for one cow. I also loved learning about all the advancements with cranberries. And the new technology that could go to Matt’s phone so now you can check the bogs more efficiently. It was so amazing seeing everything.”

Debbie Pribell of Birds and Bees Farm in Columbus and NJFB membership coordinator says, “I really enjoyed learning about the plant life, and the refurbishing of new bogs after being in production for 100 years. The new technology in agriculture sure does make farming much easier than our grandparents!”

Jennifer Wilson told us she enjoyed seeing the cranberries in different production stages and expressed the same feeling that some of us here still have: “I felt a little guilty walking on someone else’s crop, especially when I saw the workers raking up berries that missed the truck. Every berry counts! I was amazed by the complex network of canals involved in an otherwise a fairly simple production system. Cranberries are surprisingly high maintenance. I knew that growers took measures to monitor frost, often through the night, but I was surprised to learn how often frost watch occurs. Clearly, there is no off season for cranberry growers!”

Jenny Carleo of the Cape May County Extension Office shared some lovely photos with us [which we will share with you all when our server is back online!] and enjoyed seeing the entire harvest process from start to finish.

“Everyone in the group as well as their guests enjoyed themselves thoroughly,” Tim says. So did the Pine Island team! It’s always great to speak with a group who are truly interested in all the nuts and bolts of an operation and who love working in this beautiful state as much as we do! Thanks for coming to visit with us, and we hope to see you again!

Harvest 2016 visits

Posted on October 21, 2016 by stef

We had a special visitor come in to view the harvest today: Nora Muchanic from Channel 6 Action News!

First, she got to see the Gates Harrow in action. The harrow is one of our newer picking methods, which picks cleanly, quickly, and efficiently, and causes less damage to the vines.

She also chatted with team members Mike Haines (pictured below), Jeremy Fenstermaker, and Bob Heritage before getting into the water with the gathering crew! This crew was working with the traditional elevators today, rather than the new bogside cleaners, but it’s always a fascinating process to witness.

While she wasn’t able to stay and visit the packing house, we followed the truck back to the platform anyway. . .just for our readers!

Big thanks to Waldemar Blanco, Rick Zapata, and Mickey Mercado for letting us get in their way today, as well as to Mike, Jeremy, and Bob for taking the time to chat! And thank you to Nora and Channel 6 for being so great to work with; we appreciate your patience and flexibility.

Harvest challenges

Posted on October 7, 2016 by stef

Water was a big concern going into the autumn this year, as we hadn’t had any rain and were running the wells off and on every day. But our team remained optimistic, and in fact, the weather ended up cooperating for a bit!

“It’s been a very challenging year for water,” says CEO Bill Haines. “We had a very dry August and not much rain in July either. We were short on water and running wells constantly when the season started. Fortunately, we got four inches of rain on the first day of harvest, so that’s given us some relief, but we still don’t have a lot. So we’ve had to be very inventive about how we get the water, but conservative in its use. And because we’ve been waiting on color and the color’s been slow coming, we’ve had to be flexible about which bogs to start picking. Often they’re not the most logical place/sequence for flooding, so we had to get creative by moving water mechanically instead of by gravity, and just using our imagination to get stuff done. Jeremy [Fenstermaker], Matt [Giberson] and Gerardo [Ortiz] have all done a good job with it. They’ve been flexible and willing to try new stuff. So far it’s worked.”

Some varieties color earlier than others, and that is a factor we consider when planning our picking strategy. Ocean Spray likes a consistent color, so we will take samples to the receiving station to check the TAcy number (an acronym for “total anthocyanin concentration” and is a unit of color measurement used in a cranberry) before harvesting. Unfortunately, we haven’t really been getting cooler evenings until recently, but things are finally cooling down and the past couple nights have helped a lot with color.

“With the TAcy considerations, we don’t want to go into high production beds and have low TAcy,” says Matt Giberson. “We’d rather go into the Early Black beds and get those out of the way first. We also worry about rot; we don’t want fruit to get bad, so we have to get it out of there. We’re taking our time with the later varieties until we get the required color level. Cooler days and the cloudiness last week were pretty good for the fruit. We could use another one to two inches of rain, but we’re better off than we were a month ago.”

“In past years, we’ve been done by November 7th,” Matt says, “which means we have about one month left now with over 900 acres left to go. But we’re about to kick things into high gear, acreage-wise. Today we started all three crews at once for the first time this season, and once we get that color where we want it, we’re going to really start rolling!”

Harvest begins at last!

Posted on September 23, 2016 by stef

The 2016 cranberry harvest is finally underway at Pine Island, and the Pine Barrens have never been prettier!

This week was the real test for the new customized tractors we spoke about last month. Since the last harvest, our team has modified two tractors with high-powered blowers (much higher than we have used in previous years). On the front is the hookup for the boom, which can be used by a single operator. The idea is to have the driver hydraulically operate the boom so that when he comes up to a pipe gate or a corner, he can run it out from the cab and will no longer need to rely on extra crew to change it manually.

“It went extremely well,” says COO Bryan vonHahmann. “Like anything you design, research, develop, and build, once you finally implement it you find things you might have predicted but weren’t quite sure about until it’s put to practical use. But this first week’s been great, and we can now boom up a bog with two people versus six people. It’s so much more efficient; the team moves faster because the equipment moves more quickly and we can allocate resources better.”

Tweaks are already being planned. “The blower portion works phenomenally,” Bryan says. “One thing we need to adjust is that we run the clutch a little bit, because even in the lowest gear the tractor moves a bit too fast. The other is that a boom full of fruit is heavy, and the arm that pulls the boom is flexing more than we would like once gathering gets underway. Part of that is just getting the operators used to how they need to position it and to keep an eye on it, and part of it that we’ll need to reinforce the arm. We did think of these two things before we put the equipment out there, but weren’t quite sure to what degree it could impact us.” The team can likely use the tractors all season without issue, but we’ll start making the modifications and apply what we’ve learned to the two additional tractors Bryan wants to build for next year! “It’s a huge advantage,” he says. “Even with the changes we’re going to make, the work the team is doing with them is fantastic.”

Pine Island Cranberry Co., Inc.

Haines & Haines, Inc.

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