Water was a big concern going into the autumn this year, as we hadn’t had any rain and were running the wells off and on every day. But our team remained optimistic, and in fact, the weather ended up cooperating for a bit!

“It’s been a very challenging year for water,” says CEO Bill Haines. “We had a very dry August and not much rain in July either. We were short on water and running wells constantly when the season started. Fortunately, we got four inches of rain on the first day of harvest, so that’s given us some relief, but we still don’t have a lot. So we’ve had to be very inventive about how we get the water, but conservative in its use. And because we’ve been waiting on color and the color’s been slow coming, we’ve had to be flexible about which bogs to start picking. Often they’re not the most logical place/sequence for flooding, so we had to get creative by moving water mechanically instead of by gravity, and just using our imagination to get stuff done. Jeremy [Fenstermaker], Matt [Giberson] and Gerardo [Ortiz] have all done a good job with it. They’ve been flexible and willing to try new stuff. So far it’s worked.”

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. Unfortunately, we haven’t really been getting cooler evenings until recently, but things are finally cooling down and the past couple nights have helped a lot with color.

“With the TAcy considerations, we don’t want to go into high production beds and have low TAcy,” says Matt Giberson. “We’d rather go into the Early Black beds and get those out of the way first. We also worry about rot; we don’t want fruit to get bad, so we have to get it out of there. We’re taking our time with the later varieties until we get the required color level. Cooler days and the cloudiness last week were pretty good for the fruit. We could use another one to two inches of rain, but we’re better off than we were a month ago.”

“In past years, we’ve been done by November 7th,” Matt says, “which means we have about one month left now with over 900 acres left to go. But we’re about to kick things into high gear, acreage-wise. Today we started all three crews at once for the first time this season, and once we get that color where we want it, we’re going to really start rolling!”