Tag Archives: team profiles

Pine Island Team Profile: Vincent Arnwine

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Pine Island’s main ongoing projects this week are sanding, bog renovation, and finishing the swan string installation. To continue this new year with introducing new faces, team member Vincent Arnwine has had a front seat for most of these jobs. Vincent, a local resident, joined our team shortly before the harvest, and is enthusiastic about everything he’s seen and experienced since he started.

Vincent worked on Kelvin’s gathering team during the harvest, and really enjoyed learning the process. He had been visibly impressed at the time with the team ethic (“It’s really cool to work at a place where everyone is willing to do what needs to be done; nobody’s above doing something and no one is afraid of hard work,” he said at the time) and that hasn’t changed since the harvest ended and he began to work on other jobs around the farm.

Mostly what he’s been doing is driving: he’s hauled sand to build up the dam at Ox Pasture, drove a Gator at Papoose hauling out dirt when the team was digging a new ditch, and has been driving for the sanding team since the end of December. He also helped install a gate and worked with Kylie’s team putting up swan string. “I’ve been having a lot of fun,” he says. “It is a change from the harvest; it’s still hard work but it’s not as hectic. It’s a little more predictable; you can be sure of what you’re doing on any given day.”

Vincent especially likes working with long-time team members; he says they’re teaching him a lot. “I’ve worked with Junior on almost everything since harvest except for the swan string,” he says. “I keep telling him, I want to learn to operate the heavy equipment next.”

He’s also been out with Jeremy on the weekends to check the water, just to start learning a little bit about it. He thinks this time of year is a good time to start learning about the big picture; he’s learning a little bit about how the water flows and how it’s directed. “During the harvest everything happens so fast,” Vince says. “I couldn’t see where it was coming from, and there are a hundred things to do. You can’t learn it all in one day, but you have to start somewhere!”

Vince definitely knows how to do whatever it takes. While the winter tasks rarely change from year to year, sometimes problems arise and the team needs to work together to fix them. On this particular day, a cable got tangled while shifting the sanding barge from one side of the bog to the other. But the entire team pitched in to untangle the line safely, and the work quickly got back underway.

Vince’s energy and enthusiasm is “a revelation”, Bill says. “He really gets it.” Vince doesn’t quite see it that way.

“You gotta have fun where you work. If not, you’d be miserable. This doesn’t feel like work, man. I’m just having fun. What’s that they say? ‘If you like what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.’ That’s here. That’s me.”

Pine Island Team Profile: Kylie Naylor

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For the new year, we’re focusing on a new face at Pine Island Cranberry: Kylie Naylor, our new Pine Island Integrated Crop Management (PIICM) supervisor. Kylie, a graduate of Delaware Valley College, earned her BS in agronomy in 2010. She’s from a farm family in the area and had previously scouted for blueberries, so she was familiar with both Pine Island and the work involved. “Cranberries are new for me, though!” she says.

Kylie came in at the end of October, just catching the tail end of the harvest. “It feels likes I’ve done a lot in a short amount of time,” she says. So far she’s worked with the fall planting, worked on underdrain repair, and is beginning to learn the basics of water management.

“I liked fall planting the best so far,” Kylie says. “You see it at the beginning, when there’s nothing there but the soil. . .and then you get to see the progression to a bog full of uprights. You get to see what you’ve accomplished.” The big project Kylie is currently working on: installing swan strings.

Tundra swans migrate to the area every year from Alaska and northwestern Canada. They are a tremendous annoyance to local growers due to their feeding habits. They are particularly fond of red root, a weed that competes with cranberry vines for nutrients. You might think that swans are a natural solution to the problem; unfortunately, when the swans fly in to feed, they not only tear out the red root, they also tear out vines and leave enormous holes that damage the beds themselves.

Since the swans are a protected species, growers have had to come up with a solution to keep them away from the crop. At Pine Island our PIICM team installs, or puts up, swan strings. To start, the team places rebar in the ground along the longer sides of a bog, about every 75 feet. On the ends of the bog, the team walks it out and determines how many lines they’ll need to run lengthwise though the center.

Once the rods are laid out on the dam, a team of three to five people gets into the bog and walks the string across. “We can the job done with three team members,” Kylie says, “but it’s much more efficient if you have five: you can have three in the water walking string and one person on each dam tying it off.”

Once the entire bog is strung, the team goes back in and puts up poles, which are used to keep the strings out of the water so that they don’t freeze. They’re placed in a checkered pattern, not necessarily on every line. The poles can either be cedar posts or recycled irrigation pipe. In addition to the recycling/environmental aspect, Kylie says that reusing the irrigation line is lighter and easier to handle, especially when the weather gets cold and the team starts using a kayak to place them.

The strings help keep the swans out of the bog by limiting the space available. “Swans are like a commercial airliner,” Bill says. “Having the strings up disrupts their attempt to both land and take off again.” Not all of the bogs are strung; our team maps them out where we have found red root and where the swans have been spotted. Kylie marks the map as she goes: the areas outlined in purple need to be done, the areas filled in with green are where she and her team have finished, and the areas outlined with red are where the sanding team is still working. Once sanding is finished, Kylie and her team will go string those particular bogs.

Swan strings are just one small part of the big picture that Kylie is slowly getting to know. Her biggest challenge, she says, is just learning the day-to-day business of cranberries. The process in general is fascinating to her, and she is enjoying figuring out how all the smaller parts that she is working on fit into the bigger picture. “Baby steps,” she says. “I like the challenge, though. I like coming in and learning how to do something new. And then I like figuring out ways to make it even better!”

Pine Island Team Profile: Junior Colon

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While the majority of our team is working hard on all the different processes during our harvest, it’s not the entire story. Pine Island Cranberry has some long time team members who truly embody our core values, who believe in who we are and what we do, and work hard to make it happen.

One such employee is Domiciano Colon, better known as Junior. Junior is a second generation employee who has been with Pine Island since he was just out of high school. “I started out picking cranberries,” he says. “Picking, gathering…I did all that stuff.” Bill Sr. started him working with heavy equipment back in ’82 or ’83, and he just went on from there. “I did a lot of maintenance, then I started with the mowers. Then the excavators…little by little. I worked on them all. Now whatever there is to do, I do!” He also started working on the bog renovation team back in 1985 with Howard Sprague and Joe Colon, and then in 1988, he says, he worked his first one on his own. “Osborne Spung was my first bog by myself,” he recalls. “It was the first one we did with the laser, too. Grading, stripping, leveling; I did all that.”

Junior’s versatility is what makes him an especially valuable team member during the busy harvest season. (Bill agrees: “Everyone wants Junior when they need an extra hand.”) When the Green Team was harvesting Sim Place, Junior ran the forklift at the transfer station, loading flatbeds that other utility team members Wilfredo Pagan and Ivan Torres would haul to the packing house. “I’m all over the place at this time of year!” Junior says. “We got the flat beds and used them to haul; it’s easier than bringing all those smaller trucks back and forth. That distance will put a lot of wear and tear on a truck.” If we’ve covered it in a blog entry, he’s done it. He’ll be on frost watch in the fall, he’ll watch for heat damage on weekends. Yesterday he hauled for Jorge Morales’ gathering crew (“…and helped pull out someone who got stuck!” he says, laughing).

Today, he’s scraping (smoothing) the dams. Scraping the dams is something that Junior tries to stay ahead of during the harvest. He’ll take the scraper out and make sure the dams are level before one of our harvest teams starts picking, and then he comes along after they are done with a bog and makes sure that they are smoothed out again. As you have read in our storm entries, proper dam maintenance is important for our water management as well as safety and equipment.

“It actually needs to be very precise,” Junior says. “I need to drive slowly; if I go too fast the road doesn’t level the way it should.” He doesn’t only keep up; he needs to stay ahead. “I smooth them ahead of time and when they’re done, I smooth them again.” It’s slow going, but necessary.

Junior was also a key team member during the post-Isaac cleanup. He did a lot of our dam repairs and helped install the lift pumps. Once the harvest is over he will be back on bog renovations, assisting with the planting, and pitching in anywhere else he is needed. It’s people like Junior who make Pine Island Cranberry nothing but the best!