Pine Island Cranberry held its annual harvest lunch this week to say thank you to all of our team members who work tirelessly all year round but have really stepped it up this fall for both the harvest and the fall planting. It was also a chance to say good-bye to our seasonal team members, who are heading back home until next year.

One seasonal team member who will be retiring this year is Arturo Vieyra. Arturo has been coming to us for fifteen years; he worked on the Green Team gathering crew and has stepped up to do a thousand other things over the years, wherever he was needed. He has been a living example of Pine Island’s core values, always doing whatever it takes to help us bring in a better harvest, year after year.

Our team has a lot to be proud of this year; we set several production records and had our best harvest yet at Sim Place. Our newly created clean-up team put us ahead of schedule on our winter maintenance. As CEO Bill Haines said to the assembled team: “We delivered 38,000 barrels in two days. You can be proud of that and of everything else you’ve done this year.”

Bill also told the team: “It was a good harvest. It wasn’t a great harvest; we always want a record. But I will say this: everyone worked very hard. We had a very low rot percentage, which is fantastic. Everything was done way ahead of schedule. And that is a credit to organization and how hard everyone in this room worked. It means that if we’re doing the same things we’re doing right now, if we’re all working to improve what we do when it needs to be done, we’ll continue to see better results next year and every year after that. We have a great team here at Pine Island. And I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you’ve done for this place.”