Tag Archives: whatever it takes

Waiting for spring

Posted on by

Our March tasks remain much the same as they did in February, right down to working around the inconsistent weather!

Fortunately, this year the unexpected is a beautiful stretch of sunny dry weather, instead of an early March snowstorm like we’ve seen in some recent years.

We are continuing to run at least two sanding teams, weather permitting, as well as working on survey lines and our ongoing current bog renovation project.

While there was some concern last month that our team would not be able to do any prescribed burning, we did end up with enough clear, dry days that we were able to get some done here and there.

When the weather isn’t coperating, the team continues to keep busy on several indoor tasks!

Winter tasks 2021

Posted on by

In addition to sanding, our team is working on some of our other usual winter tasks. Running two or three sanding crews means that a lot of team members are busy, but there are still other things to do!

Harvest time can be tough on our dams, as well as wet weather, so our team will also do some maintenance work on them in colder weather. Some dams are really only used during harvest, and if they get any ruts in a heavy rain, it’s usually fine. But the ones everyone uses most can deteriorate quickly, pushing out both water and sand; proper maintenance now is much more efficient than trying to fix the problem later. In some instances, all we really need is to pass over it with the scraper.

Our bog renovation, of course, is always ongoing, and when it’s wet outside, some team members will be indoors assembling sprinklers for the new renovation as well as repairing old sprinklers: replacing worn out nozzles, springs, and sprinkler heads.

Well-maintained, consistently available equipment and facilities that are fully operational are instrumental to Pine Island’s daily efficiency and the success of our operation. The facilities/equipment team usually has several projects going at once, assisting the sanding operation, the bog renovation team, and working on building upkeep, as well as doing all the necessary equipment maintenance in order to be prepared for the growing season and beyond.

Pine Island Team Profiles: Dan Land

Posted on by

Pine Island is now in the thick of harvest, running three teams seven days a week to bring in the crop! One of our newer team members, Dan Land, is experiencing his first cranberry harvest and is doing a fantastic job learning as he goes.

“We got a lead from Johnson’s Farm earlier this year,” explains COO Bryan vonHahmann. “They called Bill [Haines] and said they had someone who used to work for them and was really good, but they didn’t have anything for him at the moment and wondered if we might. So Mike [Haines] and I chatted with him a few times to see if it was the right fit, both for him and for us. Periodic check-ins have shown that he wants to learn everything as well as understand it. He’s a very hard worker and we think he’ll continue to grow.” Dan has also made an impression outside of Pine Island. “Dan actually ran the planting project at Red Road this past spring,” Bryan says, “and we got an email from Maryann at Integrity Propagation about how much she enjoyed working with him; none of us have ever received a review like that! It was good to hear.”

“We’re breaking him in slowly,” says operations manager Matt Giberson. “He’s helped with water a little bit, but now he’s on a gathering crew and getting a better idea of what harvest is all about. He’s asking a lot of questions; he’s a really smart guy, and I think he’s got great potential. His head is always on a swivel, taking it all in. He’s doing really well for his first harvest.” Not every team will finish at the exact same time, so Dan took an opportunity when his own crew was done to go check out how the other two teams ran things. “Each crew does things a little differently,” Matt says. “On Tuesday, once Dan’s crew was done, he went over to Blondie’s crew to see what he could pick up. That was really good to see.” Dan even takes ribbing really well: “He wears a lot of Jets gear. I mean, he says that’s because he worked for them, but it seems kind of fishy to me!” (We just think it means he really is very intelligent and understands that discretion is the better part of valor.)

“We’re going to keep Dan engaged and challenged,” Bryan says. “So far, it looks like it’s working.” Welcome aboard, Dan!

Tropical storms

Posted on by

Just a couple of weeks ago our team was running sprinklers to make sure the beds were getting water, but this week changed all of that with the arrival of Tropical Storm Fay.

While our team works rain or shine, wet weather can make some tasks more difficult, especially bog renovation, and team members will sometimes move on to something else until things dry out. In the past, we’ve had to switch things around a little because we don’t want to wreck the dams or the bogs we’re renovating. For example, the Hydremas will keep running but but haul less per load, and if needed, the bog renovation team will take the opportunity to move equipment to get ready for the next stage.

“We’re getting it pretty good right now from this storm,” says manager Matt Giberson. “We saw it coming a few days ago, so Louis and his team had all the Crisafullis looked over and the lift pumps checked. We started lowering canals and reservoirs Wednesday to make room for all the rain. So far everything looks good! The great thing about this is it’s raining during the day, not at two in the morning, so we get a better visual of what we are looking at and what we need to make it easier.”

Too much rain can have a negative effect on pollination as well as fertilizer application, so we have to be ready. Farming is all about doing what you have to do when you when it’s time to do it, and our team makes sure to plan for every possible outcome.

Planning

Posted on by

The Chatsworth area experienced another overnight power outage this week as thunderstorms rolled through the region. If the outage had continued for several days, however, Pine Island Cranberry would have been prepared, thanks to the planning demonstrated in this blog post originally published on June 26, 2015.

The storms that blew through southern New Jersey this week left a lot of the area without electric, and Pine Island was no exception. But our Facilities/Equipment team came through for everyone!

Facilities/Equipment Manager Louis Cantafio says, “When the power went out Tuesday night, we figured it’d be back up sooner rather than later, so we spent Wednesday working on things we could do without electric. By the end of the day, though, we realized we were in it for the long haul; estimates were for power being restored as late as Saturday. So Bill [Haines] called me on his way home and said, we need to put together a plan and make sure everyone has water.” Bill told Louis to assume he’d have whatever resources he needed and to let him know if there were any roadblocks, and the team was off and running.

“The biggest challenge was getting enough generators,” Louis says. “I hit five places and found ten generators. I’d back up, unload, and the guys started unpacking, putting in oil and fuel, staging them at the locations we’d identified along with additional fuel cans, and Mike [Guest] and Emmanuel [Colon] would follow shortly afterward to make sure the wells got powered. It was amazing.” Facilities Supervisor Mike Guest agrees: “This was definitely a team effort, no question. Louis did a great job finding everything we needed, then the shop got them up and running…it couldn’t have been done and done that fast without excellent communication.”

“We did good!” says Equipment Supervisor Carlos Baez. “The generators would arrive, Fred [Henschel] and I started building them, and then Ernie and I started to deliver them while Fred and Coco [Mercado] started filling 5 gallon cans and set them up with every generator. You can do without a lot and keep going, but you can’t do it without water.” Fred adds, “It was a production! But now we’re going to disassemble everything, label it, and then store it in a secured area and add them to the maintenance plan, so we’re ready if it ever happens again.”

For his part, CEO Bill Haines is impressed. “Everyone did a hell of a job,” he says.

Last but not least, of course, some of our intrepid office staff made the rounds Thursday in a Gator, bringing water to everyone who was out working so hard!

So a huge thank you to our Facilities and Equipment team members Louis Cantafio, Mike Guest, Emmanuel Colon, Carlos Baez, Ernie Waskiewicz, Coco Mercado, and Fred Henschel; to our office team members Debra Signorelli and Stacey DeLaurentis, for keeping our hard-working team hydrated; to Matt Giberson and PIICM Manager Cristina Tassone, for keeping the planes moving; and to our neighbors at Lee Brothers, for allowing us to use their wells to fill our own tanks. Our team is second to none in the industry, and that is in no small part due to their willingness to do whatever it takes for both our land and our people.

Spring water

Posted on by

It’s been a focused month at Pine Island Cranberry as our team got back to work and finished the annual tasks of removing the winter flood and preparing for frost.

Bog flooded for winter

We’ve said it so often you can probably recite it with us by now: good water management is absolutely critical to growing cranberries. Growers rely on a clean, abundant supply to maintain the bogs year round. The key question, as everyone here knows by heart, is “Where is the water coming from, and where do you want it to go?” For every acre of vines, cranberries require ten acres of water. Therefore it is another one of Pine Island’s top priorities to make sure our surrounding environment is as protected as possible. As we said about removing the winter flood, good water management is not only the crucial part of our work here at Pine Island – it’s essential to the balance of agriculture production with the Pinelands environment.

Reservoir

The Cohansey-Kirkwood aquifers lie beneath the surface of the Pinelands, containing enough water to cover the state of New Jersey six feet deep. Most of the water in the aquifer comes from rain, which also helps fill our reservoirs. When we flood the bogs for the winter, we direct the surface water (using damns, canals, and ditches) to the bogs at the highest elevations. Gravity causes water to flow downhill, so, once the bogs at higher elevations are flooded, we can easily direct it downhill to bogs at the lower levels.

When the warmer weather sets in, the bogs are drained so that the dormant vines awaken for the growing season; while cranberries are most frequently harvested using the “wet pick” method, they do not actually grow under water and thus need to go through the same growing cycle as any other fruit crop. The process, which we call “dumping water”, is deceptively simple: a team member takes a gate hook and removes the boards that have been placed across the gate in the bog. (The boards are removed in a specific pattern to work with gravity and the natural flow of the water.) Once the boards have been pulled and placed on top of the gate, the water moves to the next bog along the ditches. This water returns to the reservoirs and canals in order to be reused for the next part of the cycle.

Gerardo pulling boards

water moving to the next bog

The next stage is frost protection. Typically, a cranberry bog is built at a lower level than the land immediately surrounding it and the bog temperature can drop ten to fifteen degrees lower than the uplands. These conditions make monitoring bog temperature a top priority once the winter water comes off, which is why installing sprinklers quickly and efficiently is so important. Our team worked extra hours in April to make sure it was all done before temperatures started to drop at night.

Ultimately, it is our Pine Island team’s dedication to our land and our surrounding environment that makes us what we are: growers dedicated to doing what we do better every day.

Back in action!

Posted on by

Spring stops for no one, especially in agriculture, and this week Pine Island’s team went back to work with even more safety precautions in place!

“We returned to work with our top priorities being safety and the current crop, and we’re taking both very seriously,” says COO Bryan vonHahmann. “We’ve trained and are retraining on social distancing; we’re sanitizing all equipment and common tools and areas several times a day, offering rubber gloves and face masks, and providing hand sanitizer at all jobs and at common buildings. We’re also designing the various tasks that are needed in a way that minimizes co-mingling people and maximizes distance between people. If proper distancing of at least six feet cannot be obtained (such as in vehicles, or meetings, providing instruction, et cetera), everyone should wear masks. We are also asking that everyone minimize gatherings, meetings, and personal interactions.”

As far as tasks are concerned, Bryan says: “This week, we worked extended hours to catch up on our water draw and sprinkler install; by the end of today we’ll be caught up. Planting for renovation is being delayed at least one month to reduce close interactions and working through the logistics of getting the plants.”

“We’re no longer meeting at the shop in the morning; instead everyone is to go directly to their job site,” says manager Matt Giberson. “Everone is going to keep all equipment clean; for example, if they’re in a loader, they’re going to clean it first in the morning when they get in, then again after lunch, and once more at the end of the working day. If someone (or a family member) is not feeling good, they’re to call me and not come into work. I’m doing my best to keep people on the same job or at least within the same group to the best of my ability.”

The team has spent this week removing the winter flood and so far are hitting their targets! “Our goal is to take down 106 acres of swan string and to do five irrigation systems per day, with the final target to have all the water off by April 30th,” Matt says.

Our team is working long hours to make sure everything gets done (“We got a lot done this week, even better than I expected,” says CEO Bill Haines) and will be taking a well deserved break over the holiday weekend before going back Monday to start all over again, and everyone will keep looking at ways to make it even better. “This situation will show us new ways to do things,” Bryan says.

Hope all of our readers are continuing to be safe and well!

From Bill’s Desk: Keeping our team safe

Posted on by

One in an occasional series of entries from CEO Bill Haines.

On Monday, March 23, Bill addressed our team about recent world events and how Pine Island has decided to handle the pandemic in the short term.

After giving it a lot of thought, we decided the prudent thing to do was to shut down for at least a week. The management team will meet next Monday and assess what’s going on in the world, and then we’ll decide whether we’re going to work next Tuesday or not. If we decide it’s a no go, we’ll wait another week and assess.

We understand that everyone has families to take care of and bills to pay, so we’re going to make sure everyone gets their weekly paycheck.

We also understand that this is a farm and Mother Nature doesn’t wait. We need to grow the crop and we need to harvest it. We understand this is going to put us behind. Whenever we can come back to work, we’re going to do whatever it takes to catch up. If that means working dark to dark and Saturdays and Sundays, that’s what we’re going to do. We’ve never been through a pandemic but we’ve been through plenty of emergencies: in the Labor Day flood of 2012, we had 16 inches of rain in 9 hours that took out all of our reservoirs and many of our interior dams, as well as damaging irrigation systems. And we put all that back together in three weeks and started harvest right on time. So I know that my team can do that; we can do whatever it is we have to do.

I also want to remind everyone to do everything that’s been requested of them in terms of social distancing and washing their hands, etc. This is to keep everyone safe. This is not just time off; this is to keep all of us safe. Stay home, take care of yourselves, and take care of your families.

For our readers: please take care of yourselves and stay safe. We’re all in this together!

The 2019 harvest begins!

Posted on by

Our busiest season has finally begun! Our harvest crews started picking at the southern end of the home farm and out at Sim Place this week.

“We started out at High Bridge because those are now the oldest beds planted with early-season varieties,” says CEO Bill Haines. “These bogs in particular are planted with Crimson Queen, which are our earliest variety. We like to plant those furthest from the center of the farm. As we finish picking beds we’re working our way closer and closer to home. It means we don’t have to travel as much for frost, among other things.” Conditions have been pretty favorable as well, he says. “The water level is good. And it hasn’t been too hot, either. We even had frost last night, which will help us with color.”

As of right now, we’re only running two crews, but expect that to change shortly. “We’re also picking the young bed at Osborne Spung for first time, which have been planted in Mullica Queen,” Bill says. “This will be our first significant harvest for that particular variety.”

Our team has had to make some adjustments to their approach, as they do every year. “Some of the regulations have changed with Ocean Spray on rot percentage and color,” says manager Matt Giberson. “Which means we need to keep an eye on things. When you’re driving by a bed it looks red enough on top but under the canopy it’s white, so we have to manage that. And rot tends to be high in the young beds before a canopy is fully established, so we’re testing samples before it goes to Ocean Spray. If the numbers aren’t great, we’re taking it to our own packing house and clearing it out before we send it up the road.” Matt also notes the optimal conditions this week. “We have plenty of water, but it has been a little dry. We’re starting wells now in order to be prepared in case it remains dry; we haven’t needed to in a long time so it’s good to have them ready anyhow.”

In general, the color is looking really good this year, he says. “Better than it was at this time last year. The TAcy seems really good for the Crimsons. We’re starting our third crew this weekend. The lake’s done, we’ll have Panama done Tuesday, then we’ll finish getting the early stuff from Sim Place. We’ll get the Ben Lears out, go down through Worth Tract, and pick all the young beds.”

If Matt had just one wish for the upcoming season? “We could use just a half inch of rain. Just a little bit! But I think it’s going to be steady as she goes. We got frost a little early this year, but that should help with the color. When we don’t have to chase the color, it all goes a little bit easier.”

Winter’s end

Posted on by

Our March tasks remain much the same as they did in February, right down to working around the inconsistent weather!

When a winter storm is expected, the number one priority is checking the water. The team checks for washouts, makes sure nothing’s too high or too low, and makes sure there’s no water on the dam itself. Team members make sure the main pathways are cleared; in order to do that, we send the front loaders home with some of them, which means once the snow hits, they can plow themselves out and start clearing the main dams. Then the rest of the team are able to go check the water or get to one of our facilities to do indoor work. Fortunately, we haven’t had high snow accumulation this year!

While the snow has been melting quickly, the frequent rains interspersed with low temperatures have been a persistent challenge all winter for our team.

We are continuing to run at least two sanding teams, weather permitting, as well as working on survey lines and our ongoing current bog renovation project.

While there was some concern last month that our team would not be able to do any prescribed burning, we did end up with enough clear, dry days that we were able to get a little done here and there.

When the weather isn’t coperating, the team continues to keep busy on several indoor tasks!