Author Archives: stef

Ox Pasture

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One of our projects that was bumped up after the effects of the Labor Day storm is raising the level of the dam out at Ox Pasture reservoir. Ox Pasture is the biggest reservoir on the main farm. Situated at the northernmost end and bordering the property now owned by the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, it is the primary source of water for the main farm.

During the Labor Day storm, the NJCF Franklin Parker Preserve lost some dams, making it necessary for us to break part of our Ox Pasture dam to relieve the pressure of the water coming down and to save some of our own bogs from from flooding. “If we can force it to break at one particular spot, it allows us to save more dams from breaking as well as protecting the fruit,” Tug Haines says. It will also help us if (when) we get more heavy rain in the future. The repair to Ox Pasture was made immediately along with the rest of the dams that broke around the farm in other high-water areas, as it was imperative to get back on track for the harvest.

Caring for the place where we live, work, and grow not only means caring for our land and our environment, but for our neighbors as well. Raising the dam serves two purposes: reinforcing our own infrastructure by protecting our water supply, and helping our neighbors. While it benefits us in the future, it will also allow us to help the Parker preserve make the necessary repairs to their property.

Before we started raising the dam at Ox Pasture, we rehabbed existing turnarounds (places for trucks and equipment to pull over) and made three new ones so that it’ll be easier to get more trucks closer to the north end of the property. Dams are only made for one-way traffic: if we can find a way to allow for more traffic, we can get more more trucks out here at one time and do everything more efficiently.

The process itself is pretty straightforward. The truck goes to a clearing and gets loaded with sand:

The load of sand is then taken back to the dam and unloaded in front of a bulldozer:

As with our bog renovation projects, the leveling by the bulldozer is done with the help of a laser.

With so many trucks in circulation, we’ve been able to complete the project in less than a week, which will help us get started on the work repairing the Parker property.

While this project is our top priority at the moment, building up our dams is a yearly maintenance task, and our team will be checking up on other areas affected by the storm in days to come.

Drainage

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Irrigation and proper drainage are two of Pine Island Cranberry’s foremost priorities in our water management plan, which is in turn a top priority in our PIICM program. In addition to having irrigation systems that reduce water usage, well-drained soil is necessary to keep a bog’s root system functional. As we mentioned in our entry on heat this past summer, maintaining sufficient drainage across the bog is crucial in the prevention of conditions that can lead to the presence of Phytophthora, which causes root rot. This makes water management crucial not only for the current crop but for successive crops as well.

Papoose #1, one of our bogs at Sim Place, has had several issues with drainage over the past few years. It has been staying wet in the middle, and after several attempts to mend the problem with drainpipes, our team has turned to building a new ditch as a solution. Jeremy Fenstermaker, leading the team with Junior Colon, says that this is a last resort: “We’re trying to get away from ditches; all of our newer bogs have been designed without them because it makes for an easier harvest. But we’ve laid this one out to make it easier to cross over with the picking machines at harvest time.”

One of the main problems with the previous drainpipe fixes was that the wet soil would eventually clog the pipes and the water wouldn’t be able to get through. Having the new ditch through the middle of the bog will improve both the surface and subsurface drainage. The ditch has been plotted out through the center so that we can make it the center of the picking pattern in the fall; in our more recent entry on water harvesting, each bog is picked in a specific pattern according to terrain. The new ditch will change this slightly, but it’s designed to for minimal damage to the vines.

Jeremy and Junior work with a laser system in order to both set the depth of the ditch and keep it level.

Since Papoose is an established bog, Junior is using the little excavator both for space and because it has rubber tracks, which won’t be as hard on the vines:

For the same reason, team members are running the Gators over wooden boards placed on the bog surface: since they’re driving on the same spots repeatedly, it will keep wear and tear from the plants.

The soil from the new ditch is loaded onto a truck and hauled away. Sometimes we can sift the dirt and use some of it for topsoil, but there are often enough weeds to make it the less efficient choice. Plus, as Jeremy points out, “This really isn’t a common practice.”

Ultimately, the effect should be beneficial, to both the harvest and the environment. Improved root growth leads to increased access to nutrients, which in turn can decrease the likelihood of damage from both disease and drought.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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As you might imagine, the team members at Pine Island Cranberry have some cranberry-related Thanksgiving traditions. Bill spoke with the Philadelphia Daily News last week and shared some of his, particularly his wife Nadine’s delicious homemade whole berry sauce:

boiling cranberries for homemade sauce

Bill and his sister Holly, our CFO, are also very fond of their mother Sara’s cranberry nut pie. Holly says, “I make it all the time; it’s my signature dessert!” She is also adding cranberries to her stuffing this year.

When asked what he traditionally has at his house on Thanksgiving, general manager Fred Torres grins and say, “Cranberry wine!” But he is also fond of his own mother’s homemade cranberry sauce and homemade cranberry juice, as well as cranberry sweet rolls, which Tug’s, Becca’s, and Stefanie’s mother makes for the harvest team every year.

Controller Joann Martin is also a fan of the homemade recipe as well as Ocean Spray’s jellied sauce. Looking a little further ahead, she likes to string popcorn and cranberries for her Christmas tree!

Equipment/Facilities Manager Louis Cantafio says his wife Kathy is going a little crazy this year now that she has access to such a great supply. Another fan of the homemade sauce, she also makes cranberry bread, a cranberry horseradish, and Louis’s favorite, cranberry chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.

Overall the homemade recipe is the big winner with our employees; others who are making it include administrative assistant Debra Signorelli and webmaster Stefanie Haines. Stef also throws Craisins into everything, and they’ll be making an appearance with both her cornbread stuffing as well as with roasted butternut squash.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us to all of you!

Fall planting

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This week, Pine Island Cranberry is trying something new: we’re attempting our first fall planting using rooted cuttings. Our planting team is out at High Bridge #1, planting the beds prepared by Joe Colon this past summer.

Previously planted with Early Blacks, we are moving to Crimson Queen, a variety chosen for higher yield potential. A major focus for Pine Island is increasing yield while lowering production costs, and renovation is a driving force behind our growth strategy: young bogs are redesigned for efficiency as well as yield.

The process remains the same as it does for our spring 2012 planting: the planter is loaded with the rooted cuttings, which drop onto a carousel:

And then other team members follow the planter to make sure the cuttings have been placed correctly.

But not everything is the same as it is in the spring. For one thing, the days are much shorter and the team cannot go at the same pace. In this particular case, it’s not too much of a worry: we’re planting this bog to see if it works. A big concern is timing and how the new plants will react to the winter flood: will they float when the water comes up, or will they stay in place? To address this concern, we are going to do a quick shallow overnight flood and remove the water the next morning. This will pack the soil around the new plants, and should anchor them well for the winter flood.

The soil will also stay wetter longer. “That can be ideal, but it can also be a nightmare,” says Tug Haines, who is fulfilling the same supervisory role that he did during our spring 2012 planting. “If a rainfall like we got on Tuesday happens in May, you can get a warmer, drier day and it won’t get sloppy. On the other hand, if it dries out too quickly you can kick up a lot of dust.” He also points out that we won’t need to water as much with this November weather. New PIICM supervisor Kylie Naylor adds: “Plants do tend to stick in machines when it’s cooler or raining; that can slow us down.”

As always, Pine Island is continually striving to improve internal processes and increase efficiency, and our team learned a lot last spring. The sprinklers have already been installed, and both our four-seater and six-seater planters used in tandem can speed up the process considerably by starting at opposite ends of the new bed and meeting in the middle. “We worked out the ideal system for that in April and can apply the lessons learned in November,” Tug says.

Thanks to our capable equipment team, our machines are also running smoothly due to meticulous care in the off-season. We’ve made some small improvements with regard to safety as well as spacing, which is often the most nerve-wracking part of the job. With this bed, the crew needs to make sure for every ten feet you have about thirteen to fourteen plants. It takes some planning, but our team is always ready.

Hand Ditching

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Ditching is often mentioned as a usual part of the spring/summer maintenance routine on a cranberry farm, but at Pine Island Cranberry we also do some late autumn cleaning after the harvest is in. The ditches surrounding every bog must be kept free of debris in order to ensure adequate water flow for both flooding and drainage.

Our spring and summer routines take care of all the main ditches; our autumn/winter ditching covers the smaller ditches in the middle of the bogs. Unlike the main ditches, which we clean annually, we clean the smaller ditches on a rotating basis. Newly renovated bogs are designed differently, without smaller ditches running through the middle, so as bogs are redesigned we can re-allocate our resources toward other post-harvest activities such as sanding, raking, reservoir and pond cleaning, planting, and the winter flood.

Jose Cruz-Soto, better known to us as Blondie, has been with Pine Island full-time for almost fifteen years. He was a member of our highly efficient fairy-ring crew, has run the Orange Team’s gathering crew for the past few years, and runs our weed control, so is well-suited to work with a crew of over a dozen team members to make sure the hand ditching goes smoothly.

The process starts with hand-trimming the ditches: often vines start to grow across, so it’s necessary to cut them back and clean up the edges of the ditch. This can be done with either a trimmer or a brush cutter.

The rest of the crew follows along behind the trimmers. Each member of the first group will use a large hoe to gather the debris (vines, berries, weeds, etc) together; the second group has each member using a pitchfork to scoop up it up and deposit it on the side of the ditch.

Some bogs are easier to work in than others; as it turns out, berry variety can make a difference. Stevens vines are thicker than Early Blacks (which are a thinner, lighter vine), so it’s harder to cut them back, especially when using the brush cutter, since mature cranberry vines grow densely.

Finally, another crew, led by Mickey Mercado, comes along to pick up the debris using handheld beds, or carriers. The bogs are usually too wet to be able to use a Gator, so it needs to be done by hand. The debris is then loaded onto a truck and taken away.

Hand ditching is an unglamorous but necessary task that we perform each year. It is part of the care and attention that Pine Island Cranberry pays to our land and our environment, and it is leaders like Blondie who help us get it done.

Harvesting results

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Pine Island Cranberry was fortunate to have escaped Hurricane Sandy unscathed. We stored all of our tall equipment (elevators, et cetera) or sheltered it as best we could. Total rainfall over the course of the storm was only an average of 4.5 inches. Our team was out pulling all the boards and lowering all the reservoirs, so we had no flooding problems at all. There are some trees down, and we did use one lift pump in order to redirect some of the water and spread it out a little, but overall we “weathered” the storm and kept everything intact!

Considering our worries after Isaac, our harvest also turned out well. Overall, 48% of our acreage was affected, with 35% of our farm was under water and an additional 13% troubled by high flood waters moving through. Despite the worry, our teams finished on Saturday, working at top speed to get everything in, and brought in the third largest crop in the history of Pine Island Cranberry: almost 30 million pounds!

The three harvest crews did an amazing job: we had one new team leader and two new crew leaders learning on the job, and together with our more experienced leaders and team members finished the harvest in 35 days, averaging almost 40 acres a day! That’s in addition to all the time everyone put in during the storm as well as the massive cleanup effort afterward. Pine Island employees truly strive to do everything they do better every day, and the care and attention they show is extraordinary.

Pine Island Cranberry broke several personal records, in fact. 12 bogs on the main farm and 7 at Sim Place broke previous harvest records. Sim Place itself (even with 2 harvested bogs that had to be thrown out entirely and 84 acres under water for up to 72 hours after the Labor Day storm) harvested a record crop. 56% of our Sim Place property was under water after the storm, and yet we managed over 3.2 million pounds of cranberries brought in from Sim Place alone.

Nor were the knocking and gathering teams the only ones breaking records. This season, we had a record number of barrels delivered out of the packing house in one day: over 14,000 barrels, or 1.4 million pounds!

It has long been Bill’s central philosophy that at Pine Island Cranberry we are growers: it’s what we do and who we are. Our team members pride themselves on doing our best, never quitting, and loving what they do. And it is at times like this, at the end of a long, tough season, that we see what we are made of, what we have accomplished, and what we can accomplish moving forward. It’s how we work to become the best at what we do.

Pine Island Team Profile: Junior Colon

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While the majority of our team is working hard on all the different processes during our harvest, it’s not the entire story. Pine Island Cranberry has some long time team members who truly embody our core values, who believe in who we are and what we do, and work hard to make it happen.

One such employee is Domiciano Colon, better known as Junior. Junior is a second generation employee who has been with Pine Island since he was just out of high school. “I started out picking cranberries,” he says. “Picking, gathering…I did all that stuff.” Bill Sr. started him working with heavy equipment back in ’82 or ’83, and he just went on from there. “I did a lot of maintenance, then I started with the mowers. Then the excavators…little by little. I worked on them all. Now whatever there is to do, I do!” He also started working on the bog renovation team back in 1985 with Howard Sprague and Joe Colon, and then in 1988, he says, he worked his first one on his own. “Osborne Spung was my first bog by myself,” he recalls. “It was the first one we did with the laser, too. Grading, stripping, leveling; I did all that.”

Junior’s versatility is what makes him an especially valuable team member during the busy harvest season. (Bill agrees: “Everyone wants Junior when they need an extra hand.”) When the Green Team was harvesting Sim Place, Junior ran the forklift at the transfer station, loading flatbeds that other utility team members Wilfredo Pagan and Ivan Torres would haul to the packing house. “I’m all over the place at this time of year!” Junior says. “We got the flat beds and used them to haul; it’s easier than bringing all those smaller trucks back and forth. That distance will put a lot of wear and tear on a truck.” If we’ve covered it in a blog entry, he’s done it. He’ll be on frost watch in the fall, he’ll watch for heat damage on weekends. Yesterday he hauled for Jorge Morales’ gathering crew (“…and helped pull out someone who got stuck!” he says, laughing).

Today, he’s scraping (smoothing) the dams. Scraping the dams is something that Junior tries to stay ahead of during the harvest. He’ll take the scraper out and make sure the dams are level before one of our harvest teams starts picking, and then he comes along after they are done with a bog and makes sure that they are smoothed out again. As you have read in our storm entries, proper dam maintenance is important for our water management as well as safety and equipment.

“It actually needs to be very precise,” Junior says. “I need to drive slowly; if I go too fast the road doesn’t level the way it should.” He doesn’t only keep up; he needs to stay ahead. “I smooth them ahead of time and when they’re done, I smooth them again.” It’s slow going, but necessary.

Junior was also a key team member during the post-Isaac cleanup. He did a lot of our dam repairs and helped install the lift pumps. Once the harvest is over he will be back on bog renovations, assisting with the planting, and pitching in anywhere else he is needed. It’s people like Junior who make Pine Island Cranberry nothing but the best!

Ocean Spray: “From Bog to Bottle”

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Pine Island Cranberry was very pleased last week to host a visit from George Giorno of Ocean Spray, who brought along business partners Rich Rosen and Ed Machala of White Rose Wholesale Distributors and Terry Brown, Ron Camporeale, and Bill Gibbons of Acosta Sales Agency. While George’s guests work closely with Ocean Spray on marketing and distribution, they had never actually seen a cranberry harvest before and were, to a man, thrilled to be here. It’s always a pleasure to speak with people who are genuinely enthusiastic about what they do and are so willing to completely immerse themselves in a new experience.

Their day started with a chat from Bill, who gave them a brief history of Pine Island and a bit of background on what they were all about to see.

Then it was off for a whirlwind tour of our harvest! Bill and Cristina took them everywhere: our guests saw how we manage our water, how our knocking crews get the berries off the vines, how our gathering crews collect the crop, and how the packing house gets them ready for the next stop on their tour: the Ocean Spray receiving station. Dan Schiffhauer walked them through the process there, and they finished up with a tour in Bordentown, that essentially, as George says, “filled the bottle. The day was a great education for us all.”

George continued: “For me personally, this was one of those days as an Ocean Spray employee where I drove home a little taller in my seat knowing that behind every bottle of Ocean Spray juice there lies an army of great people creating the best Cranberry products in the world – and what a blessing and honor it is for me to be a part of this fantastic cooperative lineage.”

*photos courtesy Terry Brown

Packing House

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about water management, the picking crew, and the gathering crew. The final step before the Ocean Spray receiving station in Chatsworth is our packing house. This process, unlike the previous, really is as simple as it seems. It is, however, a continuous process, and relies on constant communication between the team leaders and the packing house team, as well as between the packing house and the receiving station.

Each team on the bogs has been assigned a color: Orange, Blue, or Green. In order to properly track each team’s production, their bogs are assigned a different section on the packing house platform.

Each bog is run through the blowers separately. When a new bog is started, the first load from the new bog has a post-it note attached to it with our Exhibit A number, or bog identification number. It is the team leader’s responsibility every day to let Mike Guest, our facilities supervisor, know what their plan for the day is and to keep him informed of any problems that might occur during the day.

“We switched to this new system back in 1999,” Mike says. “It’s actually a lot easier and I think works better.”

First, the forklift crew, led by Joan Dominguez, unload the full cranberry boxes from the trucks coming out of the field. If the boxes are coming from the bog that Mike is sending through the blowers, then the forklift crew will dump the cranberries from those boxes into the hoppers. If Mike is not running that particular bog the forklift crew will stack the boxes in the appropriate spot for that crew on the platform.

Once the cranberries are poured into the hoppers, they pass along the belt through the blowers, which are used to partially dry the fruit and remove as many of the leaves as possible.

These leaves are collected throughout the day and sold to local blueberry growers; when Pine Island still had a blueberry operation, we used this to mulch our blueberry fields. Nothing is ever wasted!

Once the leaves are blown out, the fruit drops onto another belt and from there move up the truck elevator into the waiting trailer.

Team member Harry Mick keeps the loading moving; he signals our drivers, Candido Rivera and Josue Rodriguez, to keep the trailer inching forward as each section is filled with fruit. It is then his task to halt the line when the trailer is full or the bog is finished in order to bring the next waiting trailer forward.

While all of this is going on, other team members are busy rinsing off the belts in order to keep the equipment as debris-free as possible. They also take advantage of pauses in loading to sweep up the extras and push them toward the debris pile. In addition, everyone pitches in when necessary to clear out the hoppers, which occasionally can get jammed. The last box out of a bog usually has a lot of leaves, grass, and other bog debris, and can clog the line and cause hold-ups both here and at the receiving station if we do not take care of it immediately. Therefore, the constant washing of the equipment and attention to detail by the packing house crew help keep our harvest running.

While all of this is going on, trucks from the Blue, Green, and Orange teams are coming and going, keeping our forklift operators busy!

“It can get tough when we have a lot of fruit coming in, because we can only get the trailers out so fast,” Mike says. “But everyone hustles, and everyone helps, and we do what we need to get done.”

Gathering

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Last week we went into a bog with one of our picking crews. The next step is one of the most beautiful (and heavily photographed) sights of the harvest every year: gathering the crop. But as with everything related to the harvest, it’s not as simple as our well-trained team makes it look.

An afternoon spent with Tug Haines’ Blue Team at Red Road shows just how much work goes into the second part of the harvesting process. It can be more difficult in some places than others, depending on terrain. “Sometimes the ground is uneven,” Tug says. “The boom has a chain weight underneath, but if the ground is high enough the boom can push back and some fruit escapes.” This is less of a problem with bogs that have been renovated, since the beds are completely level.

Once the knocking machines leave the bog, it’s time to put the boom in. It’s not always necessary to get more than one or two people into the water for this part, but on this particular bog system there are several trees lining one edge, so the gathering crew, led by Kelvin Colon, need to get into the bog and do this by hand.

Each end is then attached to a tractor, which slowly moves along the dam, corralling the berries. Some members of the gathering crew follow alongside, “sweeping” the berries and making sure they stay within bounds. “There’s a trick to it,” Tug says. “It looks really simple but it’s tough to get the hang of it; a lot of guys want to move quickly but it actually gets done faster if you slow down. You only move as fast as the tractor; your body should be slow but your arms should move fast.” Once that is done, both ends of the boom are connected to the boom reel, which is wound ever tighter as the berries are brought up the elevator onto the truck.

While part of the crew is pulling the boom ever tighter, the other part of the crew are setting up the elevator in order to remove the berries from the water and load the trucks bound for the packing house. There are two parts to the elevator: the bed elevator, which is the part that runs into the bog, and the truck elevator, which is the part that leads up to the truck.

As the bed elevator is lowered into the water, someone is there to connect it to the sprayer, which uses the water to help push the berries up to the elevator.

Once all of this is done, it’s time to start moving the berries into the trucks, which have been lined up and are waiting for the set-up to be finished. As each truck pulls up, a crew member jumps up top and makes sure the load is level and that no berries are lost. Kelvin, the Blue Team gathering crew leader, explains, “We get a board to cover the top of the trucks because the two boxes on the back are separate; it keeps the berries from falling between.”

Communication is key with this endeavor; the crew member standing on the truck has to signal both the drivers and the crew members in the water when to stop and when to start. Kelvin’s job is to oversee all of this; he needs to keep the crew and the trucks moving, makes sure that no berries are escaping the boom, makes sure that the crew is pushing berries away. He needs to keep the berries evenly distributed among the boxes on the trucks. Once they’re down to about ten boxes, Tug will start letting the water out. The trick there is not to raise it too high for the pickers in the next bog.

Vincent Arnwine, a new team member who started just before harvest, is visibly impressed by the teamwork involved. “Last week, some of the guys on the picking crew pitched in to help us finish at the end of the day. 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.”

This attention to detail and willingness to step up to the plate shows: our Blue Team has finished the Sim Place portion of the harvest, and despite the flooding and other weather-related setbacks, Sim Place has set a new record. Pine Island Cranberry is proud of every single member of our entire team, who have worked so hard in the past weeks to help get us all here.