Five years ago this week, we launched the Pine Island Cranberry website! While the harvest updates have been by far the most popular (to no one’s surprise!), we are periodically amazed by how many people enjoy the little snapshots of our year, and are always touched by those of you who take the time to tell us so. We are, as always, glad to share with so many people the things we do, how and why we do them, and how much we love it.

Longtime readers of the website are very familiar with Pine Island’s core values, particularly our dedication to continuous improvement: doing everything we do better every day. Among the things we’ve focused on in the past year include working on the next phase of our automation program, improving upon our harvest equipment, working with field experts on our plant nutrition program, and, of course, our ongoing bog renovation! Our team is also exploring new ways to combat the issue of swans in our established beds.

We even added a couple of new features to the blog! A couple of new occasional features we’ve added cover some of the Haines family history as well as a quick look at some of Pine Island’s favorite vendors. We’re proud of our history and our community, and are glad to work with some wonderful companies that have similar goals.

We also did a couple of fun posts around the holidays that will probably become a regular yearly feature: if you missed them, check out what some Pine Island team members were thankful for this year as well as what they wanted for Christmas! (We’re still working on that pink Hydrema.)

And, of course, harvest has both its challenges and triumphs this year, culminating in our second biggest crop ever, and third biggest in terms of barrels per acre! While we remain unavailable for public tours, we did enjoy visits from the agriculture community, as both Ocean Spray and NJ Young Farmers & Ranchers stopped by. We also received some news coverage from Action News, as well as some delicious recipes after a visit from The Rachael Ray Show!

It’s been an enormous pleasure to tell you our story for the past five years, and we are looking forward to another year of achieving our targets, growing our crop, and remaining part of a fantastic ag community! Thank you for following along, and we’ll see you again next week!