Author Archives: stef

Propagating education

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Pine Island Cranberry’s new team members truly have a drive to learn, and have been asking a lot of questions as we head into the planting season. Bill’s son Michael Haines, who works at Integrity Propagation, was asking many of the same questions, so Bill and Integrity Propagation’s Abbott Lee, together with Pine Island’s general manager Fred Torres and PIICM manager Cristina Tassone, began a short series of “cranberry culture” seminars, designed to give in-depth information about exactly how we do things, and even more importantly, why we do them.

Michael Haines has been working full-time for Integrity Propagation since November 2011. “I never worked on the farm full-time,” Michael says. “I just came in during the summers and then for the harvest. I had a lot of questions for Abbott, and when Cristina came to him with some questions that Kylie and Matt had, he and Dad came up with the idea of seminars for people new to the industry.”

Bill and Abbott started with the history of the business. Cranberries are a relatively minor crop, so there’s not as much published information on their cultivation as, say, apples. In order to grow cranberries successfully, growers need to rely on their ability to care, observe, and think. Attention to detail is extremely important; cranberries are not as forgiving as other crops for things like frost.

The actual discussion of the process began with the winter months and an overview of vine dormancy, the winter flood, and sanding. Flooding, which serves as protection against the cold and wind, also prolongs dormancy and allows the vines to accrue the necessary number of chilling hours, which allow for proper flowering and fruiting the following spring. If the vines do not get enough chill hours, the leaves and fruit may not form properly. Flooding also controls certain pests in the fall.

Sanding is used to cover old, woodier growth, thus precipitating more uprights. This in turn promotes more buds, leading to a larger yield. Michael says he was especially interested learning about this process. “The history of it was really cool,” he says. “Granddad [Bill, Sr.] started experimenting with the process, and then when Abbott started barge-sanding, he adopted it as well and began tweaking the configuration.” There was a lot of trial-and-error in both figuring the best way to construct it and the amount of time and sanding to be done, but it speaks to how cranberry growers have learned to observe and adapt in order to do what’s best for their land and their crop. Research is still ongoing, and growers are not afraid to modify the process when needed.

“In general, it’s been great to get the big picture and see not just what we do, but why we’re doing it and why it’s important,” Michael says. “Growers just don’t do things for the sake of doing them, just because that’s the way it’s always been done. There’s a lot of work and research that goes into it.” Cristina agrees: “We work very closely with Abbott; his knowledge has been invaluable for our planting and bog renovation. Working together with other growers helps all of us through the growing season and into harvest and beyond.”

Pine Island Team Profiles: Gerardo Ortiz

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Gerardo Ortiz, a supervisor who has been with Pine Island Cranberry for over thirty years, is a versatile team member who is involved with many projects over the course of a typical year. His knowledge of both the woods and the water make him an especially instrumental team leader who rises to every occasion.

Frequent readers of our blog know that at Pine Island, it is crucial to ensure we have clean water; it not only protects the environment, but enhances our viability and sustainability. One of Gerardo’s main responsibilities is the winter flood and its removal, which are important to the health and yield for our annual crop.

“Gerardo has an extensive knowledge of the water,” PIICM manager Cristina Tassone says. “If there’s a leak anywhere, he’ll find it.” Gerardo is also a proponent of new technology, such as the new system we borrowed from a neighboring grower that we’ve been trying over the winter. This system is run on solar power and uses sensors to monitor water levels; once the water is at the ideal level, the sensor will trigger a phone call to whoever is in charge of checking the water, so that they can go and slow down the stream coming into the bog.

Gerardo’s comprehensive knowledge of the water is also necessary during the harvest, where he is the Orange Team leader, responsible for both the picking and gathering crews as well as maintaining and monitoring the necessary water levels in order to harvest each bog most efficiently.

His current project is leading the team cutting survey lines, which are necessary in order to correctly delineate our property lines. This can be a tough job out in the Pine Barrens. “The surveyors have a laser with GPS that they use; it’s pretty neat,” Gerardo says. “You can do anything with those things.”

The team goes through both ahead of and behind the surveyors, cutting out brush and trees that are in the survey path along the border of our property. Once that is done, a team member comes through with a tractor and clears the line completely.

Cutting survey lines can be a tough job. While it’s only done every other year, the team also has to deal with swampy terrain in addition to thick underbrush. Often the job is done on days when it’s too wet or icy to sand. Gerardo says cutting the path itself can be tricky: “You need to cut down the trees as close to the ground as possible, or when the tractor comes through it could get damaged.”

We are also fortunate enough to have the second generation of the Ortiz family on the Pine Island team; during the growing season and his school breaks, Gerardo’s son Jerry brings a good work ethic and positive energy, just like his dad. “In his more than thirty years at Pine Island Cranberry, Gerardo has done every job there is to be done,” Bill says. “As Pine Island has grown, his responsibilities have grown, and he has never let us down.”

ACGA Winter Meeting

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Last week, several team members attended the American Cranberry Growers Association’s annual winter meeting. The ACGA winter meeting is always a good opportunity for growers and scientists to listen to research findings from experiments during the previous growing season and the researchers’ recommendations for the 2013 growing season. This year, Pine Island sent new team members Kylie Naylor and Matt Giberson, as well as our CEO Bill Haines, general manager Fred Torres and PIICM manager Cristina Tassone. Everyone from Pine Island who attended (both the newer and the more experienced) were able to take a lot away from the experience.

For general manager Fred Torres, the opportunity to speak with other growers is invaluable. “When you work somewhere for a long time, you’re always learning. Bill Sr always said, ‘You learn something new every day’, and that’s true. But when you sit down and talk with other people about what you do and how you do it–the water, the weather–you realize how much you actually do know,” he says. “It’s a good refresher.” And he likes to hear from the experts. “Even when it’s something we’ve been working on with the research center,” he says, “you can pick up a lot from the questions other people ask.”

PIICM manager Cristina Tassone agrees. “For our new people to start asking questions, that’s what’s really great. I love that we have team members willing to ask questions, who can figure out ways to make the research relevant to us and apply it to our own operation.”

Cristina also really likes hearing from people in Massachusetts and Wisconsin. “It’s good to hear what works and what doesn’t in other areas,” she says, “and a lot of it can reinforce why we make the decisions that we make.” She also likes hearing from different speakers and other growers and how they apply theoretical knowledge to real-life situations. “The winter meeting is especially good for mingling,” she says. One of the presenters this year brought a demo of some new database software that some Massachusetts growers are trying, and several growers in New Jersey have long been interested in trying out different database systems so that we were all compatible. Our team will be starting to use iPads in the field this year in order to better track crop data; finding good database software will help us improve our efficiency even further.

Newer team member Matt Giberson was also interested in the software possibilities. “Just being able to update in the field and store it at the office will really save us time,” he says.

He was highly intrigued by the research on new varieties as well. “That will be interesting to see how they shake out ten years from now. It’s kind of cool to be there at the beginning, to know you can compare and contrast something like Demoranville to the Early Blacks. Yield, rot resistance, all that stuff.” He was interested to hear about the research on holding late water in Massachusetts (the practice of withdrawing the winter flood in March then re-flooding the bog in later April for one month) though he doesn’t think it would work here.

PIICM supervisor Kylie Naylor agreed, but found the process fascinating as well. “I came in at the end of harvest, so really I’m just learning about the entire harvest year from scratch,” she says. “So I found a lot of the information really helpful, even as an outline.” She was especially interested in the presentation on heat and applying water to the cranberry canopy, as well as the research on fruit rot resistance. “It was a really good preview of the kind of things I can expect.” Since she came on board after the summer meeting, it was also a good chance for her to get the visual for the practical research at the Marucci Center. She also liked the talk on safety, having done her senior seminar on AgrAbility and modifying tractors to make them easier for older farmers to use.

Overall, the Pine Island team largely agrees with Cristina’s take: “We’re always tweaking our crop management: the varieties, the water management, irrigation, cooling…the more we understand, the better decisions we can make.”

Facilities maintenance

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Well-maintained, consistently available equipment and facilities that are fully operational are instrumental to Pine Island’s daily efficiency and the success of our operation. Back in August, we profiled our new Equipment and Facilities manager Louis Cantafio while at the same time highlighting the opening of our brand-new shop.

Louis has settled in nicely at Pine Island, and he and his team have been working hard to do whatever it takes to keep our equipment running efficiently throughout the harvest and well-maintained in the off-season. This week, he outlined several of our current and upcoming projects.

Equipment/Facilities Manager Louis Cantafio

“Having the new shop facility is a tremendous help in and of itself,” Louis says. “The lifts in particular are fantastic; we use them for the heavy equipment all the time. They’re great from both a safety and an efficiency standpoint.” The size of the new facility makes things easier as well; the equipment team now has plenty of room to keep several projects going at once. “If something comes in that needs to be worked on immediately, we don’t have to move any equipment outside. We have the space to bring everything in.”

In April, we’re due to start work on four equipment storage buildings by the new shop. Two of them are being rebuilt after being torn down in the aftermath of the 2011 storm that took down the old shop; the other two are still standing, but will be rehabbed and updated. Louis is enthusiastic about this project, believing that it is a wonderful opportunity to make things better. “I’m always thinking about ways that we can keep improving operations,” he says. “Refurbishing is a big part of that. I like being able to keep these buildings, which are a part of Pine Island’s history, and being able to update them means we can do that.” We are also planning on repainting our former main office, currently being used for storing some of our weather monitoring equipment.

Other upcoming facilities projects include building two of the planned five pump houses at the Oswego renovation, starting next month. The slab has already been poured, and the rebuilt engines are already in place, along with the suction lines and dog leg. We’ll also be installing the larger size double wall tanks, which have the benefit of better environmental protection (always a concern with water management) and having to be fueled less often, which saves us both money and time.

Finally, facilities supervisor Mike Guest has been working hard on our employee residences. Recently, foreman Kelvin Colon and his expanding family moved to a larger house on the farm, leaving his previous residence open. Mike has been working on updating the plumbing and appliances as well as repainting in preparation for the next team member who will be moving in. “This kind of maintenance goes on all year round on an as-needed basis,” Mike says. “But since it’s vacant, it gives us the chance to make sure everything is updated. It costs us less in the long run to maintain something than it does to continually fix it.”

Forest stewardship

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One of our core values at Pine Island Cranberry has always been protecting the environment; we care for the place where we live, work, and grow. This value is central for our water management, as we have discussed in the past. But while water is our main concern, it is not our only concern.


Pine Island Cranberry, working with Bob Williams of Land Dimensions Engineering, created a forest stewardship plan in 2001; after some revision, the state approved it in 2005. While Pine Island had always informally practiced good stewardship, creating a specific plan helps us to protect and improve the forest resources by allowing forest practices to be implemented on the ground while maintaining a thriving forest ecosystem through prescribed burning, road maintenance, and boundary surveying.

Photo courtesy Bob Williams.

Our top priority when implementing the forestry plan is water quality protection; as always, any and all activity must be done in a manner that ensures the protection of our surface and ground water resources, including streamside and wetland buffer protection measures. Wildfire protection and management is also an ongoing concern; Pine Island has worked very closely with Bob Williams in order to make sure that we are complying with regulations making sure that any thinning occurs in a manner that keeps the local wildlife safe. The key is prescribed burning, which Pine Island uses to help prevent wildfires, as well as keep the forest watershed healthy. Reducing overgrowth also allows more nutrients, sunlight, and water to go to the pine trees, while promoting the growth of natural weeds and grasses that benefit the wildlife.

Photo courtesy of Bob Williams.

Photo courtesy of Bob Williams.

Good forest management practices also indirectly benefit our cranberry harvest. “Thinning the forest helps keep the bees from being diverted in the spring,” PIICM manager Cristina Tassone explains. “This way, the bees stay on the bogs when the vines are in bloom.” Forestry also helps us implement our ICM program more efficiently by reducing the number of team members needed for weed control, especially for removal of red maple.

As a result of our careful attention and years of effort, Pine Island Cranberry was named New Jersey’s outstanding forest steward of 2011 by the state Department of Environmental Protection for our management of the woodlands on the Wading and Oswego rivers. When asked why he considered forestry management as one of his top priorities, Bill says: “When you’re responsible for a resource, it’s your duty to take care of it for the next generation.” Bob Williams adds, “You can’t have great cranberries without great watershed forests.”

Photo courtesy of Charles and Barbara Newlon.

Photo courtesy of Charles and Barbara Newlon.

Pine Island Team Profile: Vincent Arnwine

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Pine Island’s main ongoing projects this week are sanding, bog renovation, and finishing the swan string installation. To continue this new year with introducing new faces, team member Vincent Arnwine has had a front seat for most of these jobs. Vincent, a local resident, joined our team shortly before the harvest, and is enthusiastic about everything he’s seen and experienced since he started.

Vincent worked on Kelvin’s gathering team during the harvest, and really enjoyed learning the process. He had been visibly impressed at the time with the team ethic (“It’s really cool to work at a place where everyone is willing to do what needs to be done; nobody’s above doing something and no one is afraid of hard work,” he said at the time) and that hasn’t changed since the harvest ended and he began to work on other jobs around the farm.

Mostly what he’s been doing is driving: he’s hauled sand to build up the dam at Ox Pasture, drove a Gator at Papoose hauling out dirt when the team was digging a new ditch, and has been driving for the sanding team since the end of December. He also helped install a gate and worked with Kylie’s team putting up swan string. “I’ve been having a lot of fun,” he says. “It is a change from the harvest; it’s still hard work but it’s not as hectic. It’s a little more predictable; you can be sure of what you’re doing on any given day.”

Vincent especially likes working with long-time team members; he says they’re teaching him a lot. “I’ve worked with Junior on almost everything since harvest except for the swan string,” he says. “I keep telling him, I want to learn to operate the heavy equipment next.”

He’s also been out with Jeremy on the weekends to check the water, just to start learning a little bit about it. He thinks this time of year is a good time to start learning about the big picture; he’s learning a little bit about how the water flows and how it’s directed. “During the harvest everything happens so fast,” Vince says. “I couldn’t see where it was coming from, and there are a hundred things to do. You can’t learn it all in one day, but you have to start somewhere!”

Vince definitely knows how to do whatever it takes. While the winter tasks rarely change from year to year, sometimes problems arise and the team needs to work together to fix them. On this particular day, a cable got tangled while shifting the sanding barge from one side of the bog to the other. But the entire team pitched in to untangle the line safely, and the work quickly got back underway.

Vince’s energy and enthusiasm is “a revelation”, Bill says. “He really gets it.” Vince doesn’t quite see it that way.

“You gotta have fun where you work. If not, you’d be miserable. This doesn’t feel like work, man. I’m just having fun. What’s that they say? ‘If you like what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.’ That’s here. That’s me.”

Pine Island Team Profile: Kylie Naylor

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For the new year, we’re focusing on a new face at Pine Island Cranberry: Kylie Naylor, our new Pine Island Integrated Crop Management (PIICM) supervisor. Kylie, a graduate of Delaware Valley College, earned her BS in agronomy in 2010. She’s from a farm family in the area and had previously scouted for blueberries, so she was familiar with both Pine Island and the work involved. “Cranberries are new for me, though!” she says.

Kylie came in at the end of October, just catching the tail end of the harvest. “It feels likes I’ve done a lot in a short amount of time,” she says. So far she’s worked with the fall planting, worked on underdrain repair, and is beginning to learn the basics of water management.

“I liked fall planting the best so far,” Kylie says. “You see it at the beginning, when there’s nothing there but the soil. . .and then you get to see the progression to a bog full of uprights. You get to see what you’ve accomplished.” The big project Kylie is currently working on: installing swan strings.

Tundra swans migrate to the area every year from Alaska and northwestern Canada. They 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 PIICM team installs, or puts up, swan strings. 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. “We can the job done with three team members,” Kylie says, “but it’s much more efficient if you have five: you can have three in the water walking string and one person on each dam tying it off.”

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, Kylie says that reusing the irrigation line is lighter and easier to handle, especially when the weather gets cold and the team starts using a kayak to place them.

The strings help keep the swans out of the bog by limiting the space available. “Swans are like a commercial airliner,” Bill 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. Kylie marks the map as she goes: the areas outlined in purple need to be done, the areas filled in with green are where she and her team have finished, and the areas outlined with red are where the sanding team is still working. Once sanding is finished, Kylie and her team will go string those particular bogs.

Swan strings are just one small part of the big picture that Kylie is slowly getting to know. Her biggest challenge, she says, is just learning the day-to-day business of cranberries. The process in general is fascinating to her, and she is enjoying figuring out how all the smaller parts that she is working on fit into the bigger picture. “Baby steps,” she says. “I like the challenge, though. I like coming in and learning how to do something new. And then I like figuring out ways to make it even better!”

Sanding

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Now that the bogs are flooded for the winter, we have started our next big project at Pine Island Cranberry: sanding. Sanding is a fundamental component of our Pine Island Integrated Crop Management (PIICM) program, helping us manage the relationship between water, soil, weather, disease, insects, weeds, and nutrition.

Sanding is a process where we apply 1/2″ to 1″ of sand on the bog surface every five years on a rotating basis. This year we are scheduled to sand 232 acres. This procedure helps improve growth and yield by stimulating the development of new uprights (covering the base of the roots strengthens the root system and creates a more healthy vine) while also suppressing disease and reducing insects (by burying weed seed, spores, and insect eggs). It also improves soil drainage while at the same time absorbing and releasing heat so that frost danger in spring is lessened. This increases our efficiency by lowering the need for extra plant nutrition as well as saving water by cutting down frost irrigation times.

In New Jersey, it doesn’t always get cold enough for ice sanding (the preferred method for growers at more northern latitudes), so our team usually works with a sanding barge. This process starts as you might expect: checking on water levels. Our team needs to make sure the water is the right depth, so that Jorge Morales, our barge operator, doesn’t get stuck on any vines or worse, tear them out. “This weekend, the water levels dropped a little bit,” sanding team member Matt Giberson says. “We ended up having to let some water in.”

When barge sanding, it is particularly important to check for debris. The sand needs to be as pure as possible in order to prevent soil compaction (which can restrict water and limit growth) so we screen our sand before using it on the barge to take out any clay, stones, or other debris which could cause problems.

Our team begins to prep a couple of days beforehand by checking to see how much the water level needs to come up. The day before the crew arrives, a supervisor will get the water to sanding level (high enough to cover all vines) and measure out the distance the sander will travel. The crew will begin to sand on the deepest side. The water level can then be adjusted if necessary, which helps with dam conservation.

Our team also prepares by sending the necessary equipment out to the sanding location. A tractor with a winch is on one side of the bog, ready to move the length of the bog; an excavator is on the opposite side of the bog. The cable from the winch is stretched across the bog, through the sander (which has been lifted and put in the bog next to the excavator), and connected to the excavator.

On Wednesday, the sanding team was out at Harrison. “This one’s a little easier to do because it’s pretty square,” Matt says. “Oddly shaped bogs can be tough. But here Jorge just has to work his way to the middle and back and keep marking with stakes. It’s a simpler pattern.”

Harrison should also respond well to the sanding process. “Some varieties do better with sanding than others,” says PIICM manager Cristina Tassone. “With a Stevens bog our preliminary analysis shows that production can go down slightly, but Harrison is a Ben Lear bog, and Ben Lear seems to respond very well to sanding. So we’re experimenting a little with that.” Our PIICM program is also experimenting with how sanding affects the growth and spread of fairy ring, a fungus which works to kill cranberry vines in the root system. “Our suspicion is that it helps to spread the disease,” Cristina says, “so we’re skipping some bogs in the rotation where fairy ring has appeared. We’ll see what happens.”

The process itself is simple: a dump truck is loaded with two or three loader buckets of sand.

The dump truck then heads over to the bog being sanded, backs up to the excavator, and drops the load. The excavator operator then loads the hopper of the sander, while the sander operator moves along the cable, adjusting the opening for the sand to fall. Jorge is sanding at 1″ for this particular bog. The process is repeated, with the excavator and tractor moving forward the length of the bog together.

“It’s especially important to clean out the machines every night in case the temperature drops below freezing,” Matt says. “We clean out the sander, the trucks, the dams…everything. It’s all about efficiency.”

Building foundations

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Big changes are happening in the next couple of weeks at Pine Island Cranberry: our CFO, Holly, is moving on to concentrate on the Haines Family Foundation full-time. The Foundation, created by Holly and Bill Jr. (under the auspice of Bill Sr.) as a tribute to their mother and her championship of schooling for Burlington County residents, also supports open space and farmland preservation efforts and works closely with Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia.

Holly is very excited about this next stage in her life; the Haines Family Foundation is already doing some wonderful things, but, she says, she’s going to miss seeing her family every day. “Not only that, I love the routine of growing cranberries,” she says. “I love the cycle of what we do here all year. I’ll miss seeing that constantly.”

She’s glad to be leaving the place in such good hands. “When I first came on board with my dad and my brother, we were the management. Now we have a fantastic system in place with a lot of good people who love the place as much as we do; they’ve all become family. I know they’ll continue to do excellent work.”

The management team will miss her, as well. Joann Martin, who will be taking over many of Holly’s duties, says she’s learned a lot from her since coming on board at Pine Island. “Holly’s been great at showing me the ropes,” Joann says. “Agriculture is a new experience for me, but she’s really showed me a lot about the process, and I’m looking forward to continuing and expanding her work.”

Fred Torres, our general manager, grew up with Holly and Bill. “That’s a lot of history!” Fred says. “Holly is always professional and she was really dedicated to making sure the office ran smoothly, but she’s always aware of family. In the end, that’s what it’s all about.”

Bill agrees: “Both at Pine Island and now with the Haines Family Foundation, Holly keeps her eye on the ball. At Pine Island, we’re growers; it’s what we do and who we are. And she’ll be able to take that focus and apply it to help people, whatever it takes.”

Winter flood

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The cranberry growing season lasts from April to November; the fruiting buds mature during the winter dormancy period. During the dormant season, severe winter weather could harm or even kill cranberry vines, which is why growers must take preventative measures to protect their crop. Now that the harvest is over, cranberry growers everywhere have started their winter flooding. Under normal conditions, the temperature steadily drops post-harvest; it is important to wait until the vines go dormant before starting to put the water on. When vines go dormant, they turn burgundy in color:

Our winter flood program starts with making sure the water in the reservoirs is at the pre-determined level according to our process. If there has no been significant rain to get the reservoirs to flooding level, we start our wells. We will continue to use the wells to maintain the reservoirs and the stream needed to get the bogs flooded.

The next step is placing boards in the gates to start bringing the water level up in the bogs, much like we do to prep for the flooding at harvest in the fall. Matt Giberson, one of our newer team members who has been learning to work with the water, says, “There’s a lot to know. How the water works, where it’s coming from, where it has to go, how to move it the most efficient way. Fred [Pine Island’s GM] says to me all the time, ‘You’re not going to learn how to do this overnight.'” In practice, this means constant awareness and monitoring of where the water is coming from, where it is going, and how much stream is coming down.

Flooding starts by letting in streams from the reservoirs to canals and bogs. Strategic board placement (more boards in the southernmost bogs to catch the water) will get the ditches high and running down to start flooding from the bottom up.

As the water level in the bogs begins to rise, our team begins adjusting the water level in the bogs by adding boards where they are needed. Once the vines are covered and the stream has settled, we adjust the level of the reservoirs to maintain the stream and keep the bogs flooded for the winter. Wells are shut down once bogs are flooded, and only turned on again if it is dry and reservoir levels are dropping.

It is also necessary to make sure we are not losing water anywhere. “Sometimes you can hear the water coming through a gate that’s supposed to hold it,” Matt says. “It’s the same as running diesel fuel; it’s a big waste, and we need to try to stop it or slow it down.” He does this by adding sand or even grass in front of the leaking boards, as sometimes the sand can wash away too quickly.

As part of Pine Island’s philosophy of continuous improvement, we have borrowed a new system for checking bog levels from a neighboring grower to see how it works for us.

First, the sensor is attached to a flood gate. It runs on solar power, so we do not need to use more fuel or electricity out on the bogs.

The cord is carefully fed into the water until the sensor tape is at the level we want the bog to reach. Once it reaches the tape, the sensor will trigger a phone call to whoever is in charge of checking the water to let them know that the bog is at the ideal level, so that they can go and slow down the stream coming into the bog.. Gerardo Ortiz thinks it’s going to be a big help; he received a call telling him that the water level dropped significantly. When he went to check the bog, he noticed a board had come loose; he was able to catch the water we were losing faster than if he had waited until his next round.

Once we are flooded, our team needs to constantly monitor the bogs to make sure there are no leaks, that the water level remains steady, and that the stream remains constant. The weather is also a factor: no rain for a long period of time will shrink the reservoirs and wells may need to be started to maintain the water level in the bogs. Matt says, “If it gets cold enough for the water to freeze, I also need to check to see if I have to break any ice to keep the stream flowing, especially on the southeast gates.”

We say often that water management is the key to growing cranberries, and the winter flood is one of the major components. Our team is, as always, prepared to do whatever it takes to make sure things are done when they need to be done to protect our crop for the winter and for the future.