Author Archives: stef

Water Harvesting

Posted on by

Everyone is familiar with the sight of cranberry bogs in the fall; people remain fascinated by the spectacle. It is always one of the most poetic descriptions in a newspaper or blog story. But the reality is much more complex; running a picking crew is a carefully choreographed dance that requires both strength and skill to manage.

Rick Zapata, our Green Team crew leader, has been running a picking crew for years. “There’s a lot to think about,” he says. “It’s not as easy as just putting the machines in the water.” There’s a method to it in order to keep from damaging the fruit or the vines. The difficulty fluctuates slightly due to bog size, weeds, and terrain, as well as other variables such as water levels, crop size, and even berry variety, as newer varieties typically have a greater yield. Rick also points out that some berries do not float to the surface as easily and remain under the vine canopy, which is why they stagger machines in the water in order to both maximize yield and minimize damage to the vines.

Each bog is picked in a specific pattern according to terrain, and the picking crew has to carefully move their harvesters around stakes which have been arranged by the team leader for maximum operational efficiency. Following this pattern allows for minimal damage to the vines. Rick also needs to stay ahead of his crew and check for ditches, for everyone’s safety. “It’s easier on newer bogs; they’re more uniform,” he says. “But after a while you get to know your own section and you understand how it goes.”

The picking crew leaders are also tasked with making sure the machines have enough fuel. The machines usually hold enough fuel for about four hours of picking, so the crew leader needs to make sure that their crew has an adequate supply to maintain their harvesters.

The basic process actually is fairly simple: water reels, or “beaters” are used to stir up the water in the bogs. The berries are dislodged, or “knocked”, from the vines and float to the surface of the water. The machines are slowly rolled into the water and the wheels are lined up against each other, but not in a straight line. Initially, Rick will walk the bog ahead of the edge harvester, which is smaller and lighter than the other harvesting machines in order to maneuver more easily near the ditches. In this particular bog (Champion B, a 6.5 acre bog planted with Early Blacks), the bog is divided into sections outlined by the irrigation ditches, and the picking crew will complete picking each section before they move on to the next.

Teamwork is important while in the middle of the bog. Rick has been working with the same picking team for about three or four years, and they all know what they need to do when they need to do it. “If I have to get out of the bog for any reason at all, I can trust any one of them to take the lead until I get back,” Rick says. For instance, he turned the reins over to Jose Hernandez-Vargas, asking him to lead the crew around the section while he stepped out to remove the ramps from the entry point and bring them over to the unpicked section to make it easier to cross the ditch. The crew didn’t miss a beat!

Our team works in all kinds of weather, rain or shine. The only thing to get them out of the water is lightning. And if the picking crew gets ahead of the gathering crew, they’ll take care of some of the odd jobs such as staking, removing sprinklers, or cleaning out the leaves from finished bogs…as always, doing whatever it takes to make Pine Island Cranberry the best at what we do!

Cultivating teamwork

Posted on by

It’s the most exciting time of the year at Pine Island Cranberry: harvest has begun! Harvest time is when our core values, always a priority, acquire even greater urgency. Our Pine Island team becomes even more committed to doing whatever it takes to efficiently harvest our crop while maintaining our high quality standards. The results of harvest (minus uncontrollable weather events) are proof of the communication and teamwork among the PIICM program, our Equipment/Facilities program, and our continuing commitment to operational efficiency. Ultimately, we are growers, and it informs everything we do.

It all starts, as we have said before, with the water. Water is essential for cranberry production all year round, but during harvest good water management is paramount. At Pine Island, managing the water for their crews is the central task for our three harvest teams, led by Jeremy Fenstermaker, Gerardo Ortiz, and Tug Haines. Jeremy, our Green Team leader, who has been running a harvest crew for several years, says, “You always have to stay a little ahead of the flooding. We’ll be moving down to a new bog system Friday but I have to have the water started well before that.” While he has actively studied the methods, he’s also picked up a lot of knowledge along the way: “You eventually develop an instinct for water levels and how to raise and drop the levels in a bog in order to maximize efficiency for the crews.” He’s always thinking of ways to make things better, how to move water faster. Part of his job is simply making daily observations and taking note of things that could continually be improved. He says, “Sometimes you find a place that would be better to put a gate, or you find a way to move water through a canal rather than a reservoir.” In order to conserve water, Pine Island manages harvest so that we reuse as much water as possible to harvest as many bogs as possible. It’s arranged in a very specific pattern to work with gravity and conserve energy.

While it is the overriding concern, water management is not a team leaders’s only concern. Jeremy also has to coordinate with his crew leaders, Rick Zapata and Jorge Morales. When Rick and his picking crew are done, they move ahead to the next bog while Jorge and the gathering crew begin to corral the berries and send them over to the packing house. The team leader’s job is to make sure that the timing of each crew complements the other.

Even before the bog is flooded, the team leaders have a lot to do. They need to pull sprinklers, stake bogs so the picking crew leader knows which direction to pick, place boards in flood gates, flood to picking level, pick, flood some more in order to tighten the boom around the berries and bring them to the elevator without having to pull through high grass or weeds, and then gather. “And it’s not as easy as it looks,” Jeremy says wryly.

In addition to maintaining the careful choreography of a typical daily harvest, the team leaders must have a back-up plan for when something goes wrong. . .and something will always go wrong! A flood gate will get clogged, a harvester will break down, a truck won’t start. . . a team leader needs to prepare for all those things and either know what he has to do to fix them himself or how to delegate. Jeremy, Gerardo and Tug make sure that whatever needs to get done gets done: they’ll do whatever it takes and keep making it better. “Knowledge comes with experience,” Jeremy says. “If you do it long enough, you get a feel for what needs to happen.”

The start of harvest

Posted on by

Our team is still working hard on the post storm cleanup, and two of the bogs that were hardest hit (Otter and Fishhead) are back on track: the debris has been removed, the holes have been filled in, and the dams have been repaired. Also, the damage to the vines may not be as terminal as we feared. Next growing season will be a true test of their resiliency.

While harvest will not officially begin until Monday, the Pine Island team picked our first bog of the season on Tuesday. Ocean Spray’s Chatsworth Receiving Station wanted to test their new equipment, so we were able to help them and at the same time give ourselves an idea of how the flooding affected our crop. It worked out well for everyone.

Ocean Spray is placing particular emphasis on TAcy this year (as mentioned in our entry on varieties, TAcy is an acronym for “total anthocyanin concentration” and is a unit of color measurement used in a cranberry), so we chose Savannah #4, a bog planted with the Demoranville variety, which is specifically grown for early fruit color development and high TAcy in addition to size, quality, and vigor. This makes it a perfect control bog for all of the various extenuating circumstances.

After the bog was harvested, General Manager Fred Torres held a harvest meeting with the supervisors and foremen out at Savannah #4 to go over our expectations and priorities for the coming season. ICM manager Cristina Tassone brought up the emphasis on TAcy this season; we want to place higher priority on harvesting the bogs that were under water the longest period of time, and at the same time test the TAcy to ensure we have the color.

Harvest is what we spend all year working toward. We focus on efficiency, quality, and growth, which will be measured by size, color, brix, and soundness. We never stop striving for quality fruit until the last bog is harvested. The proof is in the way our team responded after the storm to get us to harvest on time. This is what we do and who we are.

Fred emphasized in the meeting that establishing a chain of command is important, and above all, communication is key. Our supervisors need to be able to communicate to both their crew and to management what their daily plan is and be able to deal with anything that goes wrong…and something will always go wrong. Machines will break, a truck won’t start, a boom reel will get stuck: any number of things can happen, and that’s why communication and teamwork are so important. Fred continues, “Communication and teamwork are what makes us efficient and that’s how we get things done. We don’t want to be wasting time at harvest.” Our supervisors are also instructed to take care of the water every day; they need to have the bogs flooded and ready to go at the start of the work day, whatever it takes. It is crucial to keep the lines of communication open between the the people in the bogs and the people in the packing house, so that the packing house can keep the Receiving Station apprised of any changes.

The harvest meeting also included a reminder from Louis Cantafio to review the maintenance of the harvesting machines. Louis and his crew ran everything prior to Wednesday to make sure all was in order. He wanted to ensure everyone paid attention to the tension on the chains: too-tight chains on the harvesters is too much work for the engine; it will wear out the chain and the sprockets and then will need to be replaced between seasons, which gets expensive.

All in all, we had a challenging two weeks to get to this point: prepared for harvest. Communication and continued training is key to keep us on our mission. One thing Bill has always liked about farming is that when it’s time to do something, you do it, and our team proved we will do whatever it takes to get there.

Making it better

Posted on by

Last week we found everyone hard at work in the immediate aftermath of a devastating storm. This week the Pine Island team is doubling down and doing whatever it takes to make it even better. Everyone is pitching in wherever they can: everyone who can be spared is running a dump truck or an excavator or a front loader. We’re patching everything up so we can get the reservoirs up and move around the property easily. We’re replacing gates where they got washed out. All of our trucks and all of our equipment are running at full capacity and it’s taking a lot of coordination, as there are multiple teams working at multiple locations.

“Our big focus right now is rebuilding, sure,” says Fred Torres, general manager. “But water is on our minds constantly and we’ve been slowly raising the water levels in the reservoirs and canals. It hasn’t rained in a week, so we’ve been putting boards in to raise water levels for ditches in the areas we know will be stressed the most.” It’s steady but slow work; our team is busy fixing and refilling the main reservoir breaks, but it’s necessary to go slow; you can’t bring the reservoirs up too quickly as it’s bad for fresh fill. It won’t have settled yet and will be too spongy to hold the water back. We also need to turf up the sides a little to keep them from sinking. That’s a job in itself; we needed a massive amount of gravel very quickly. Our team has had to do some innovative thinking and find ways to get material to turf up the sides right away. With so much water moving through it’s necessary to get them as sound as possible. Fred has also sent out a small team to pick up loose berries: “Once the water dropped, some fruit was left on top of the debris; we needed to get it picked up so we don’t have a problem with rot. It’s always a concern.”

We’re also busy still prepping our equipment for harvest, and we have a team out mowing dams and trimming gates to gets the boards in before the harvest starts.

The work has been nonstop. On Wednesday alone, by Bill and Tug’s calculations, two crews had managed to haul 60 to 80 loads of fill to get dams patched and sides turfed up. The difference in just a week is amazing and is a tribute to our team and their willingness to do everything they do better every day.

It’s been tough, but we’re getting it done. Last week the airstrip reservoir looked like this:

But it’s been cleaned and patched and we’re working on the water levels:

It’s also now much easier to get around Sim Place; last week the dams by Otter #2 were in bad shape:

They’re looking much better already!

The events of the past week have been a true test of Pine Island’s operational efficiency. But our team has risen to the challenge; they are working seven days a week from just about sunup to sundown to get us on track for the harvest and make us better than ever. Junior Colon, a second-generation employee who’s been with us full time for over thirty years, said it best out at Sim Place: “We’re still going. We won’t stop, and we’ll get it done.”

Bad Day at Black Rock

Posted on by

As you may have heard, things around Pine Island Cranberry have been . . . interesting this week. New Jersey caught the tail end of Hurricane Isaac, who brought us over eighteen inches of rains (along with funnel clouds) and left us with an enormous amount of clean-up.

About 1:30 A.M. Tuesday, the rainfall was significant enough that a number of our team members headed out to try and stay ahead of catastrophe, monitoring water levels, pumps, and flood gates. And the rain kept coming. By the afternoon the water had nowhere to go, and the dams began to let go.

We won’t really have an assessment of the damage to the crop until October’s harvest. But leaving the crop aside, we lost twenty dams on seven major reservoirs, irrigation main lines were damaged where dams washed out, and 50% of the farm was underwater at some point. Some bogs were only under for 24 hours, some for 48, and at Sim Place, where damage was heaviest, some of the bogs were under for almost 72 hours. “We’ll be feeling the effect of this for at least two years,” Bill says. “We won’t know about the crop until harvest begins, but we’ll need to get things back in shape, and it’s definitely slowed down the renovation project. Up until now what we’ve been doing is triage.”

Wednesday’s (9/5) priority was getting the water off the bogs, which became easier once it all had somewhere to go. This was done with the use of lift pumps (a pump that brings water from a lower to a higher level, and usually consists of a piston and vertical cylinder with flap or ball valves in both piston and cylinder base), which are used in this instance to augment the water’s natural flow as quickly as possible, as rapid drainage is particularly crucial in this case.

While the greatest damage occurred at Sim Place, the Home Farm suffered tremendously as well. Just off the main road at our Black Rock bogs (actually named for a bad day when its irrigation system was being built; wordplay and Westerns have long been farm favorites), a dam gave way Tuesday night and flooded most of the bogs in the section. Our team did everything they could with everything they had and managed to get the water off the bogs as quickly as possible; as of yesterday, they are already hard at work on repairs.

We’ve received many offers of help–equipment, manpower, whatever is needed–from the local cranberry community, and would like to thank Joe Darlington, Bill Cutts, Tom Budd, Sam Moore, Steven Sooy, Stephen Lee, all their families, and several other area residents and growers. We’d also like to thank Ted Ward of Pine Barren Liquors & Deli in Green Bank, who brought a few dozen sandwiches out to a team who had been on duty since 1:30 A.M. We’re very grateful to have such good friends and neighbors. It’s a sign of the strength of our cranberry & local communities that so many are willing to lend a hand wherever needed. We are also extremely grateful that our entire team is safe and that no buildings were damaged. What happens to the crop remains to be seen; we will know for sure when the harvest ends. Bill’s pragmatic take on the situation is that if the fruit was sound to being with, the crop might be okay; the water by itself won’t necessarily be the issue. In the meantime, the Pine Island team will hold steady and keep doing what needs to be done: it’s what we do and who we are.

New beginnings

Posted on by

One of our strategic drivers at Pine Island Cranberry Company is our equipment and facilities management. Instrumental to the daily efficiency and success of our operation is well-maintained, consistently available equipment and facilities that are fully operational. We have long maintained our own shop on the property, and early in 2011, began making plans to upgrade our facility. The weather had other plans for our projected timeline: an afternoon storm on July 24 destroyed the maintenance shop and several equipment sheds at the farm and also damaged eleven vehicles. In the end, strange as it sounds, the storm actually helped: despite the difficulties with the aftermath, we were able to put the new building in the original location.

Facilities supervisor Mike Guest acted as general contractor for the project, coordinating all aspects during the long process, and did an amazing job. Bill’s daughter Becca Fenstermaker also helped kickstart the project, visiting several area locations to get ideas for what we would need.

Friday’s grand opening was also a chance for many of our neighbors and vendors to meet our new equipment and facilities manager, Louis Cantafio. Louis, a former land manager with the Franklin Parker Preserve, has been here since early July and is greatly enjoying his time here so far. He says, “Every day it’s always something new and something different.” Mechanic Ernie Waskiewicz agrees: “It’s fun because it’s not the same thing every day, and you’re doing something that needs to be done.” With three advanced degrees, Louis enjoys learning for learning’s sake and is having a good time picking up all the ins and outs of the cranberry business. He was initially attracted to the scale of things at Pine Island, and from his time in the area (he and his wife live in Chatsworth in a house they designed and he built himself) he knows many of our team members and how they both work hard and have a good time.

Louis also believes in continuous improvement; in many ways, starting from scratch here has been a help to him in his work. He doesn’t believe in doing things in a particular way just because they’ve always been done that way; he likes finding out why things are done and then finding ways to improve them if need be, whether it’s ordering parts, purchasing equipment, or analyzing standard practices. And he’ll do whatever it takes to help achieve our company goals, pitching in wherever he’s needed.

Addressing the crowd gathered at the official opening, Bill said, “It’s a great day for Pine Island Cranberry; this makes us that much more efficient and that much better. It makes our team that much better. I’m proud of this place and I’m proud of our team: they do a great job every day to make us what we are.” Mike Guest agrees: “It’s great to see our guys able to work more safely and more efficiently.” He’s also proud of the place; he says that in addition to the surface things (layout, equipment, space), there are many things that we don’t see which contribute to making it a fantastic place to work.

In Memoriam: Sylvia Burgos

Posted on by

Our farm family suffered a shocking, sudden loss this week with the death of Sylvia Burgos, wife of Ivan Burgos, a foreman and thirty-year employee of Pine Island Cranberry Company. Sylvia and Ivan recently celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary…which is an excellent record for a die-hard Eagles fan married to a Dallas fan.

Everyone loved Sylvia; she would do anything for anyone. Often teased for her height, she gave back as good as she got (and often better, according to Fred Torres).

A graduate of Stockton, Sylvia was a bilingual master probation officer for the Burlington County court system.

In addition to her husband, Sylvia is survived by her two children, Cassandra and Ivan J., her mother Carmen Cruz, her father Gabriel Delgado (Judy), her sister Jeanette Zayas (Jose), her brothers, Gabriel and Michael Delgado, her nieces, Jennifer and Jillian Zayas, her aunt Migdalia Leon, her cousins Tony and Nick Leon, her brother-in-law Harry Burgos (Abigail) and their daughter Gladymar.

Harvest prep 2012

Posted on by

Well maintained, consistently available equipment and facilities that are fully operational are instrumental to the daily efficiency and success of our operation here at Pine Island Cranberry Company. Our goal is to have all facilities and equipment ready when needed. While this is a top priority throughout the year, it becomes even more essential as harvest time gets closer.

It is important to make sure all of the equipment has been properly maintained well in advance of the harvest: the boom, boom reels, harvesters, et cetera. The boom is taken out and checked for any repairs that need to be made, and so is the reel.

The harvesters are brought in and serviced at our shop. We also look over and repair as needed the blowers, elevators, trucks and tractors for each harvesting crew and ensure we have all the tools and safety supplies necessary to get us through harvest.

At the packing house, we do a test run on our blowers and elevators:

At the same time, we also look beyond the harvest. Getting a head start on bog renovations for 2013, Joan Dominguez and Emmanuel Colon are working on building replacement pipe gates for flooding for our Oswego renovation project.

As we’ve mentioned in a previous entry on bog renovation, we’ve been replacing our wooden floodgates with a newer PVC design for greater longevity. They are also easier to install and repair.

Doing whatever it takes to efficiently prep for our busiest time of year helps us realize our mission and our vision and exceed even our own expectations.

Waiting game

Posted on by

As we move into the late summer, we are continuing to implement our PIICM program with late fertilizer applications (or, bud set fertilizer), finishing cleaning the ditches for improved water flow, and maintaining the balancing act of keeping vines cool while avoiding oversaturation. At this time of year, we need to be careful for next year’s bud set (initiation of next year’s flower growth). During bud set, we’re more concerned with keeping the vines healthy; nitrogen is needed for both fruit development and production of the next year’s flower bud.

The berries themselves are beginning to size up and attain color. 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. While the humidity gets worse in late summer, the nights tend to get cooler, and this actually improves the color.

While we’ve talked a lot about the new Rutgers varieties when discussing planting and bog renovation, they are not the only varieties we grow at Pine Island. Many of our bogs still contain the industry stand-bys: Stevens, Early Blacks, and Ben Lear.

The Stevens variety accounts for 20% of the berries grown in New Jersey, according to the Cranberry Marketing Committee. A later variety (meaning they attain their full color later in the season), Stevens are usually the last to be harvested and are thus more susceptible to scald and rot, so we need to monitor bogs such as Roundhouse (one of our Stevens bogs at the northern end of the farm) carefully. Another interesting fact about Stevens: the majority of the crop in a Stevens bog is located under the canopy (or surface) of the vines.

The next stop on our tour was 28 Acre, one of our Early Black producers. Early Blacks are one of the oldest and the smallest varieties, but have the most intense color. (Jeremy Fenstermaker, a Pine Island foreman and harvest supervisor, likes to think that Early Blacks are the berries appearing in most commercials due to their photogenic quality.) When we harvest an Early Black bog we like to see as many berries as possible; the greater the weight, the greater the yield (one barrel = 100 pounds of cranberries).

Ben Lears are an early variety noted for its size and distinctive shape, with a deep red color about midway between Stevens and Early Blacks. We will usually start our harvest with Ben Lear bogs.

Our primary focus as we continue to monitor and scout the bogs is weed control. Dewberry is a very persistent plant that competes with cranberries for light and interferes with harvest, so removing it is a high priority task.

As always, we continuously monitor weather conditions, especially as hurricane season reaches its peak. And, all of our efforts throughout the growing season are bringing us toward our ultimate goal: a successful harvest.

Growth and opportunity

Posted on by

This week’s blog entry is once again turning inward, as we focus on some company achievements and highlight some changes elsewhere on our website.

Earlier this year, Bill was named New Jersey’s outstanding forest steward by the New Jersey DEP in recognition of his hard work maintaining the relationship of farm and forest: always a delicate balancing act in the Pines. The long-term health of this relationship depends on regular thinning and controlled burns. As certified forester Bob Williams points out in this recent Philadelphia Inquirer article, “You can’t have great cranberries without great watershed forests.” The Haines family’s dedication to responsible land ownership, caring for the place where they live and work, is a driving force behind Pine Island’s success.

A photo of Bill with Bill, Sr. by Bob Williams, Land Dimensions Engineering.

In other news, we’ve made some small additions to the main part of our website. We’ve updated our media list, and added a glossary. (Sometimes it seems that cranberry growers have their own language!) We’d love to make this site as user-friendly as possible, so keep checking back; we will continue to add new words and phrases as they…”crop” up.

Irrigation

Last, but not least, we have launched a page listing job opportunities. Pine Island Cranberry Company prides itself on providing opportunities for people who have the drive to learn, develop skills, and achieve a better future. If you are interested in working for a progressive, family-owned company with room for advancement, please check our current listings and send us your resume. We look forward to hearing from you!