Tag Archives: continuous improvement

Another year!

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This week, Pine Island Cranberry celebrates the fourth anniversary of our website launch! It’s been another busy year, and our team has definitely been taking our core values to heart!

Whatever It Takes
We do what we have to do when it’s time to do it. We say what we have to say when it’s time to say it.

The best example from the past six months is probably how our team dealt with the extended power outage this past summer, as well as dealing with the massive January blizzard!

Continuous Improvement
We do everything we do better every day.

The best examples of this are the most recent: team member Matt Stiles’ creation of periodic lunchtime learning seassions, where team members get together to brainstorm on various topics, and our work with local members of the NJ Fire Service to learn more about control burning.

Protect the Environment
We care for the place we live, work, and grow.

This past year also saw the launch of our forestry website, which so far has mainly been used to chronicle the adventures of our translocated bobwhite quail. Look forward to updates soon with this ongoing collaboration with New Jersey Audubon!

Continuous Growth
We grow more acres and more fruit per acre.

Once again, our crop management team welcomed experts such as Dr. Joan Davenport to help us achieve our mission and our vision. Our team also shipped equipment to our affiliate operation in Chile, which in turn will help them increase their efficiency in reaching their targets. We also continued an ambitious bog renovation plan that now includes trying the new Haines variety from Rutgers.

We are Growers
We grow stuff. . .It’s what we do and who we are.

We also have not forgotten that first and foremost, we grow cranberries. Our team spent time with other growers at various meetings, as well as celebrating 125 years and five generations, still “growing” strong!

Provide Opportunity
We provide opportunities for people who have the drive to learn, develop skills, and achieve a better future.

Last but not least, this past year also saw us expanding our internship program as well as welcoming some fantastic new team members on board.

It’s been a great year for us at Pine Island Cranberry, and we hope you continue to enjoy following our operation as much as we do living it!

Fire follow-up!

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Last week, Pine Island team members attended a class with some of the Fire Service’s finest! This week, a couple of them followed up with a little hands-on experience.

“Shawn [Judy] called me Saturday and said that if the weather looked good, they were going to burn Sunday,” says Matt Giberson. He and Louis Cantafio met up with the team around 10 the next morning, to start prep. “We set everything up to see which direction the wind was blowing, then we brought out maps, discussed the best approach, then did some wrangling over humidity and some other details. Tommy [Gerber] is the guy everyone kind of looks to as the final say for a lot of this, and he advised us to wait a bit.” Then Matt went for a ride around the 60 acre targeted area, where the team explained in detail what they were doing, what the trucks would be doing, who was positioned where, and the reasoning behind their decisions.

“I got to light the baseline of the fire!” says Matt. “One guy went one direction, I went another, and the guys told me when to stop and check how things were going and when to start walking again. I had to go all the way out to a certain point to form the baseline. It was interesting; the wind was blowing against my baseline and bringing the fire really slowly into the 60 acre block. While that was going on, Tommy was putting strips in to make acreage smaller and smaller.” Some of the results were especially surprising. “That piece hasn’t been burnt in sixty years, they told me. It was a lot more intense than I thought it would be, especially when I heard the roar. They told me it would happen, but you really have to see it to understand! I could hear the fire go, I saw the flames go up. It was really cool!”

Louis Cantafio was also helpful, explaining how to safely transport the equipment. Matt also learned all the problems to look for, such as how to spot fires outside of the targeted block. “Embers can fall out where you don’t want them. This is really where constant communication helps; talking about wind direction, how the fire is burning, all that.” He also learned how fast things can move! “I started walking the left flank while it was burning really slowly…then I started making the turn and Shawn told me to start running in order to bring the flank in and meet the fire as it was coming towards me.” If this is confusing to you, don’t worry: Matt drew a picture in the sand afterward to make absolutely sure he understood what he was doing.

He loved every minute of it, too. “Burning stuff on a Sunday is a good time!” he says. (Sammy Moore concurs: “Matt was having a lot of fun out there,” he says.) “It was amazing to me how quickly it burnt, and how bad the situation can get if you’re not prepared. But now I understand. I learned a lot sitting in class last week, but this kind of thing really is hands-on.”

*Photos courtesy of Matt Giberson.

FIRE!

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This week, in our perpetual quest to do everything we do better every day, Pine Island Cranberry held a class with local members of New Jersey Forest Fire Service. Mike Haines, Matt Giberson, Steve Manning, Matt Stiles, Jeremy Fenstermaker, and Tim Bourgeois met Wednesday night with Shawn Judy, Sam Moore III, and Tom Gerber to learn a little more about the history behind prescribed burning in the Pine Barrens as well as some methods and safety awareness.

All of the participants came away with a greater understanding and appreciation for the work involved. “It was really cool to learn about,” says Mike Haines. “Once you start working here [at Pine Island], you see how much actually goes into growing cranberries, and this was the same principle. Shawn and Sammy and Tommy really know their stuff. We learned a lot of the technical stuff as well as a lot of the history. Ultimately the idea is for us to start a regular program here.” Pine Island and other growers have always used prescribed burning as a tool for both forest and crop management, but now we’re trying to get a little bit ahead of the curve, so we brought in the experts to teach our team how to be safe, how to decide on proper timing, and how to recognize the various effects of changes in weather conditions.

Shawn, Sam, and Tom also stressed the importance of communication. “You need to have situational awareness,” says Matt Stiles. “But Shawn also emphasized their reliance on area growers because of their familiarity with the land.” Matt Giberson agrees: “The communication factor there is incalculable. It helps us too; when it comes time to set up a burn we can get out an aerial map and go over everything with those guys to make sure everyone is on the same page.”

The next step is getting some hands-on experience! “We obviously weren’t able to go out and practice,” says Tim Bourgeois. “But we were able to learn how to use the drop torch, and got a close-up tour of the truck and all of the necessary tools and equipment. And we’re going to be able to start riding along in the next couple of weeks to really get some personal experience.” The hands-on knowledge will be highly valuable; as Matt Giberson says, “You can only talk so much about it; you have to do it to understand how it actually works. I can’t read a book and think I can do it tomorrow!”

All of the team members in attendance were especially intrigued by the history aspect. “I didn’t know it was growers who first started it, because they had learned the hard way that cranberry vines are very flammable,” says Matt Giberson. Tim was also impressed with the instruction. “These guys really know their stuff. Especially with Sammy and Tom being able to give us the grower perspective; they’re a valuable resource.”

They are, indeed, a valuable resource. But better than that, they’re great neighbors. Many thanks to Shawn Judy, Sam Moore, and Tom Gerber for coming out and helping our team do whatever it takes to protect our home and our community!

*Photos courtesy Matt Giberson and Bob Williams.

Lunchtime learning

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This week, some of our team members sat down for the inaugural session of “Lunch and Learn”, the idea of team member Matt Stiles. Matt came to us in October (“a challenging time to start at a cranberry farm,” says COO Bryan vonHahmann) and has been doing a little bit of everything ever since. But one of the places he’s been the busiest has been with new production.

“Setting up this meeting was all Matt’s idea,” says Bryan. “When he came to me with it, I thought about it for a bit and really liked the idea. So I told him to go ahead and facilitate it. He organized the whole thing: the venue, the attendance, the time…lunch was a great idea because it keeps things casual and it’s a chance for everyone to sit down at the same time.” The first topic was weeds and erosion because, as Matt says, “they were something I’d been paying a lot of attention to while working with the new beds; with all the new production I thought it’d be a good idea if we stayed on top of it.”

Tuesday, Matt sat down with Bryan, CEO Bill Haines, Mike Haines, Steve Manning, Jeremy Fenstermaker, Matt Giberson, and Tim Bourgeois for an informal lunch meeting to discuss issues with weed control and erosion as well as brainstorming ideas for prevention and repair. “I wanted to have these meetings to discuss issues and solutions,” he says. “To talk about weeds in the new bogs and what we can do to prevent them, because it can get expensive to fix later on. So I figured we’d start with weeds, have a discussion, come up with some solutions to prevent them from establishing.” Some solutions have already been working. “Putting in clean sand will help a lot, though we have to be careful if we start to stockpile it.” Matt also found an article from Massachusetts about putting grass or a cover crop on dams to prevent weeds from getting into bogs. “We’d have to stay on top of mowing, but it might save extra work down the line. With new bogs we need to be vigilant with prevention after root establishment. If we see weeds, we need to hand pull them as best we can.” The team also discussed erosion, which can take a lot of time to fix and can cause us to lose plants. “If it takes three or four years to establish vines, over time we’re going to have a lot of acres to be repaired, which can take time and get expensive, so we need to do what we can to prevent it.” Our bog reno team already has some solutions in place for this as well.

The team ultimately decided to test a couple of things on a smaller scale, with the hope of expanding the methods to a larger area if all goes well. Both Matt and Bryan were pleased with the outcome. “I think we came up with some really good ideas to make things better,” Matt says. Bryan agrees, and is also looking forward to other topics to be discussed at future meetings: “The guys came up with a lot of good stuff to work on: applications, debris reduction, harvest technique. And it’s great that Matt came up with this; he’s got great experience and capability, and I’m excited to see where we go with this in the future.”

Irrigation refurb

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A good irrigation plan manages the volume, frequency, and application of water in an organized and efficient way. A clean abundant water supply is only the first step in Pine Island’s water management program; a detailed irrigation routine is also crucial to our goals. A cranberry crop’s needs are met in three ways: rain, irrigation, and soil contribution. Unfortunately, farmers have yet to find a way to control the weather, so they must turn to the things that they can control.

Now that the winter flood is on, our team has begun working on an irrigation refurb. “A few years back we realized not everything was working optimally,” says Jeremy Fenstermaker. “So we started testing the irrigation systems–pumps, nozzles, sprinkler heads, everything–to find out why they weren’t running the right way. Then we made a plan to get everything back up to speed over the next five years.” Jeremy, along with Mike Haines, took some time to review all of our systems and then formed a plan. “Irrigation is the only thing you have 100% control over, so it needs to be done right,” explains Jeremy. “We started out checking the pressure and flow. We knew how many gallons per minute were ideal, and if a system wasn’t reaching that we took the worst ones and decided what needed to be done.”

Part of the issue is uniformity. “There are three different spacings, which means at least three different sizes of nozzles,” Jeremy says. “So it’s a priority to get everything uniform on one system. If nozzles get mixed up, it can screw up the application rate, so we’re trying to get it to where it should be and keep it that way to improve both fertilizer application and frost control. One of the big reasons we’re doing this is that we found out with different spacings there are different rates that water goes on; we want to match it at the rate the soil can take it in, but we were exceeding it in a lot of areas. If the soil is too wet, that can lead to rot. Fixing the flow won’t to eliminate disease, but should hopefully cut it down. When everything is putting water out at same rate, we don’t have to worry about water at different times. The whole farm can run at once.” And since the bogs are flooded, this is a great winter project. It’s a whole lot easier when all the sprinklers from one system are in one box; you can put your hands on all of them.

While Jeremy is working on application rates and while Waldemar Blanco and Bob Heritage are working on refurbishing sprinklers, our Equipment/Facilities team is working on the pumps. “We have a number of engines that we weren’t happy with how they were running this past season, and since the work that needs to be done is considerable, we didn’t want to do it during the season itself,” says Equipment/Facilities manager Louis Cantafio. “We currently have seven systems in here with some issues that needed addressing, and while they’re in here we’re making some adjustments that will be useful going forward. In addition to the repairs, we’re getting them ready for automation as well as making some changes that will be more efficient for the team during frost, during the winter flood, during fertilizer application…anything that could make things better for both the equipment and the team. That’s not the main reason we brought them in, but we’re taking the opportunity to update while the bogs are still under water!”

Core values in action

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Pine Island Cranberry’s strategic plan includes this definition of our Core Values (Whatever It Takes, Continuous Improvement, Protect the Enviroment, Continuous Growth, We are Growers, and Provide Opportunity): “Core Values are what we expect of ourselves and one another.” Nowhere were these more evident than when a problem arose on Monday night.

At 5:30 P.M., after most of our team had finished the day and gone home, a fuel-truck operator, out topping off equipment, backed down a tough dam…and got too close to the edge, getting stuck, and almost tipping over into the bog. This can happen with any one of our trucks, and in most cases, all it takes is a single operator on another piece of equipment to pull the truck off the edge and set things in motion again. Unfortunately, in this particular instance our team was not dealing with a dump truck with a load of sand, but a fuel truck with 2400 gallons in its tank. The operator alerted the equipment team, who immediately called out Junior Colon, our usual go-to in cases like this. Junior took one look at the scene, and immediately said, “Call Louis; this is going to need more people.”

“It was bad; the worst I’ve seen,” says Louis. “I mean, equipment goes off the dam, but this wasn’t a load of dirt; it was 2400 gallons of fuel. The big issue was: ‘What do we do if this tips over? What happens then?’ We had to come up with a plan for the worst-case scenario immediately, because if things did start to go bad, there’d be no time to come up with one later.” So while supervisor Carlos Baez worked with Louis to empty our second fuel truck into a 2000 gallon tank (that Louis keeps empty in building 0-3 for just these occasions) and Junior Colon and Mickey Mercado went to our current sanding location to “borrow” two excavators, Gerardo Ortiz started blocking off the water, and Louis called Matt Giberson to put two more drivers on stand-by.

“Louis called me and I drove out right away,” says Gerardo. “I saw the truck had started to go in, so the first thing we did was we close that canal so water couldn’t go to the swamp and spread out. Then we closed off the top to keep the rest of the water in place so we could do something with the oil if we needed to. We were worried if the truck went completely over that we’d lose the oil to the swamp and then from the swamp to the river, so we had to contain it right away. Luckily the dam was hard enough to support the truck; any softer and it would have been a different story.”

The dam had Louis concerned as well. “It took us a long time to empty the spare truck back at the shop, and then we still had to get out to the site to re-start and empty the one that went over. That’s a lot of extra weight; those trucks are top heavy. The waiting is tough; you don’t want to lose dirt. So while all this was going on we had Gerardo shutting the water off, we were planning to get a Crisafulli in, we were dealing with upstream water…all that worst case scenario planning, because if it did go bad there would be no time. Thankfully, it all worked out okay. But that’s the furthest I’ve ever seen the truck leaning over.”

About 9:30, four hours after the truck went off the dam, our team had the truck pulled out and were finally able to go back home. Carlos, Junior, Mickey, Gerardo, and Louis truly pulled together quickly, no questions asked, and immediately did whatever to took to solve the immediate problem as well as working out a plan to provide for several different outcomes and protect our water supply and our environment. “These guys are the best,” says Louis. “When things hit the skids, everyone here just puts their head down and leans into the work. They don’t ask questions; when you call and say you need them, they just say, ‘I’m on my way’.” Carlos agrees: “It was bad that we had to go out there at all, but it was good that everyone did what they had to do, and nothing bad came out of it.”

The next immediate step for our team, however, is making some changes so that nothing like this happens again. Or, as supervisor Matt Giberson puts it, “We need to figure out how to make it better. Louis is great at this stuff; when a situation comes up, he gets everything under control and takes care of it. He called me to have two additional drivers on stand-by, which turned out not to be necessary, but shows a lot of thinking ahead.” One of the solutions, he says, is to work out a re-fueling schedule that avoids sending anyone out at night. In addition, he and Louis worked out some other details that will help avoid incidents and still keep the equipment running smoothly. Some of these solutions include making sure that heavy equipment is moved to locations that are reasonably accessible to the fuel truck (without running it in reverse) and utilizing a bulk truck to fuel small equipment (some of which could be done during the day without shutting that equipment down or stopping it). Louis and Matt have also proposed adding small transfer tanks with 12 volt pumps to two or three crew leader or supervisor trucks that would allow fueling of small equipment without the use of the 5 gallon cans or a bulk truck.

CEO Bill Haines was pleased with the team’s efforts Monday night. “It’s clear the team members that came out Monday have our core values embedded in their hearts, even if they can’t repeat them word for word. They put three of them into action this week: they showed they will do whatever it takes by working in the rain and the dark to get the fuel truck back on the dam; they planned and organized to protect the environment in case the worst happened; finally, they are already looking for continuous improvement by changing our procedures so this doesn’t happen again. I’m proud of all of them.”

Sanding 2015

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Our team has started flooding the bogs for winter, which means that our annual sanding project is now underway. 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″ of sand on the bog surface every four years on a rotating basis. This year we are scheduled to sand over 350 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 water levels. Our team needs to make sure the water is the right depth so the barge operator doesn’t get stuck on any vines or worse, tear them out. Also, 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.

The process itself is simple: a truck is loaded with sand, then heads over to the bog being sanded, backs up to the excavator, and drops the load into our specially built sandbox (designed to improve efficiency and reduce waste). 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. The process is repeated, with the excavator and tractor moving forward the length of the bog together.

As GM Fred Torres has said in the past, “You have to sand when it’s time to sand; you can’t wait for perfect weather to do what needs to be done.” Unfortunately, though, we had to delay a little bit this week due to the weather. “Heavy rains can slow the process down,” explains Jeremy Fenstermaker. “It’s a lot of wear and tear on the dams, and we’d spend more time fixing them than getting the actual sanding done.” That’s where new equipment helps: “Now that we’re using Hydremas, the work gets done faster, and their wide tires are a lot easier on the dams.”

Trommel

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Pine Island Cranberry has only been using our bogside cleaner for one season but our team is already figuring out ways to make it even better!

Our Equipment team spent a considerable amount of time over the past month or so working on a trommel attachment in order to increase the efficiency of the bogside cleaner. (A trommel, also known as a “trommel screen,” is a screened cylinder used to separate materials by size.)

The team took it on a trial run last week and were pleased with the results! “It did exactly what it was supposed to do,” says welder Fred Henschel. What this new extension is actually supposed to do is take in all the trash produced by the berry pump: berries that are too small, leaves, twigs…anything not supposed to go with the fruit, along with all the water it’s pulling up from the bog. “The problem before was, we were pulling in so much water it wasn’t separating from the trash enough,” Fred says. “We couldn’t entirely disperse the water and the trash truck would end up pulling away more than half full of water as opposed to full of just the debris.”

The team’s modifications made it possible to send clean water back into the bog and the debris into the trucks. It was also more efficient from a time and fuel standpoint, since instead of using three to four trash trucks per trailer load of berries, the gathering crew was able to load one tractor trailer with one trash truck. “It saved time on switching, as well,” Fred says. When it was time to switch out the trash truck, the team would have to stop the pump, pull the truck all the way out to the far corner of the bog, then back another truck all the way back in. Skipping that step allows the harvest to move much faster.

And in the true spirit of doing whatever it takes…”The guys were so excited to try it out that it couldn’t fail,” Fred says.

*Photos by Fred Henschel

Improvement and change

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Pine Island Cranberry always works toward doing what we do better every day. We’ve been working very hard to bring this year’s crop in with some new machinery…but we still have a crew out there with the older equipment, doing whatever it takes to finish their work!

Supervisor Jeremy Fenstermaker’s Green Team is out at Mike Hensel right now, using the old reel harvesters to knock berries off the vines. “Usually, we use the Gates Harrow on level bogs, or bogs with only one or two big picking patterns,” Jeremy says. (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.) “These bogs are older; they have ditches and aren’t very level, so we have to pick them with the reels. You need a guy leading to show where they’ve already picked. With the Gates Harrow, the water has to be low enough that Rick [Zapata] can use the fruit for a guide. With these bogs being so out of level, we can’t hold the water low enough for Rick to see where he’s picked already.”

So, while Rick is over helping next door at the Sooys’ operation (“Those bogs are nice and level, and the Sooys are great neighbors”), Jeremy reflects on some of the differences between the traditional reel harvesters and the Gates Harrow machines. “Using the Gates Harrow frees up a lot of people to do other work that needs to get done. It’s moves a lot faster, too; the only problem is you have to pick ahead so you can get the timing right for gathering and keep the water flowing.” He also thinks the new machines pick a lot cleaner than the regular ones. “I think there’s less damage to fruit with the Gates Harrow; it combs the berries off vines, which makes harvest easier on vines, as well.”

Having the additional machine still makes things easier for a crew using the traditional reel harvesters. “It’s nice having two this year,” Jeremy says. “With two you can keep three crews running smoothly with no hold-ups getting the fruit to the packing house. It works out very well.”

Bogside cleaner

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One of our top priorities at Pine Island Cranberry is efficiency; we’re always trying to find ways to become better growers! This includes being open to new methods as well as new equipment, and this week, our team tested the latter with our new bogside cleaner.

During the harvest, berries are placed on a truck via an elevator. The truck then goes to our packing house to unload and prep the berries for the receiving station by removing as much bog debris as possible. The bogside cleaner improves this process by removing the packing house step entirely and removing debris as the berries come out of the bog. “This is better on fuel and easier on the team,” explains supervisor Matt Giberson. “It should actually require fewer people in the water.”

Matt and his team tested the cleaner on some newer bogs that aren’t yet producing much viable fruit. (Young beds have yet to develop a dense canopy, and while they often yield fruit, a high percentage of that fruit contains rot.) This makes our young beds a good place to test run new equipment immediately pre-harvest. “It’s always a learning process,” Matt says. “We tried it for three days on different bogs to learn some of the variables and how we’ll need to adjust.” Among those changes were oil pressure on the pump (“That made a world of difference”, says Matt), bog shape, and amount of debris. Older bogs, especially at Sim Place, may have more roots pulled up with the rake on the Gates Harrow, which can cause the machine to jam. “We may need to make changes to the sprayer that we keep in the bog itself,” Matt says. “We’re thinking maybe adding a grate to that will help stop more branches, grass, weeds…all that fun stuff.”

“We’re going to need to make some more changes along the way,” Matt says, “but that’s what we always do! I think it’s going to make a huge difference.”