Tag Archives: whatever it takes

Winter storms

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When a big winter storm is in the forecast, the news pays a lot of attention to bread, milk, eggs, rock salt, and closures. On a farm, the work must be done whatever the weather, and our team needs to prep accordingly!

The number one priority every weekend is checking the water: checking for washouts, making sure nothing’s too high or too low, making sure there’s no water on the dam itself. Team members rotate the responsibility of doing a complete check of entire farm on Saturday and Sunday. “In order to make sure that gets done during bad weather as well, we need to make sure the main pathways are cleared,” says COO Bryan vonHahmann. “In order to do that, we sent the front loaders home with the guys, which meant once the blizzard hit, they were able to plow themselves out and start clearing the main dams. Then the other guys were able to go check the water, reservoirs, bogs, all that. And in the meantime the team just kept plowing. And plowing. And plowing.”

The Equipment/Facilities team also took some precautionary measures, making sure generators ready to go in case we lost power for an extended amount of time. They also made sure the heat was turned up in any vacant properties onsite, just in case. “We also packed the shop with equipment to work on,” says manager Louis Cantafio. “That way, we didn’t have to dig it out, or start it in the cold, or fill the shop with melting snow. We went over all the loaders, made sure they were greased and fueled and ready to go before the operators brought them home.” Then, once the storm hit, they had to start pushing everything. “All the dams where we’re running water had to be plowed,” he says, “but we also had to get all the egresses open and get rid of snow everywhere we needed to store incoming deliveries. It’s no small job, working on this place; the loaders started Saturday and kept on pushing until Monday.”

Another job well-done for one of the best teams around!

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.”

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.”

“Powering” through adversity

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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.

Chile – sand screener

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Back in February, our equipment team was working to prep our old sand screener to ship it to our affiliate farm, Cranberries Austral Chile (CAC).

Ernie, who was the lead on the project, put in a lot of time making the necessary repairs for easy maintenance when it gets down to Chile. “We want to make sure it’s in great shape for those guys,” he said at the time. “…Basically, we’re going over it and making sure everything is right and that it’s running well.” He also mentioned that actually getting it into the shipping container was going to be a project in itself, and he was absolutely right!

Coco Mercado says, “We did a lot of prep work. All the bigger stuff wouldn’t fit inside the container, so we had to disassemble all the big pieces and make absolutely sure all fluids were drained in order to pass through Customs.” Supervisor Carlos Baez says it took the entire day to disassemble everything, but it is about ready to go! “It’s going to be a tight fit, I can tell you right now,” he says. “But I took a lot of pictures as we were taking everything apart, so once it arrives they should be able to put it back together pretty easily.”

Facilities and Equipment Manager Louis Cantafio is pleased the project is just about wrapped up. “The biggest challenge was getting the conveyor off, but the worst is over,” he says. “Once it gets down there, CAC has the bigger challenge in putting it back together!” CAC, however, has been fantastically helpful about project details. “I thought I would need to research shipping companies, but they have people they deal with all the time and took care of all the transport logistics; it was great.” He’s pleased that this project is wrapping up so the team can turn their attention to some other big projects: in addition to sending some other equipment down to Chile with the screener, the team is working on several maintenance and building projects right here at home. “We’re doing a lot of work on the pump houses making sure they stay in compliance, we got the new Hydremas, we had some involvement in the camp reno, and then we’re pouring bases for new pump houses and rebuilding engines for the bog renovation project. We have a lot going on!”

“But ultimately, CAC is going to be able to increase their efficiency in processing sand, and that’s a job well done for us,” Louis says. “My team always does whatever it takes to hit our targets.”

Rick Zapata

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The Saturday after Christmas, another team member hit a huge milestone; Rick Zapata has now been working full-time with Pine Island Cranberry for forty years! During his time here, Rick has done a little bit of everything, and he’s always done it well.

“He was here for seasonal work at first,” says GM Fred Torres, who is also Rick’s brother-in-law. “I saw him when we were both down in Puerto Rico; I stayed longer than I was supposed to, and when I came back, Rick was here full-time and he’s been here ever since!” CEO Bill Haines has also worked with Rick since they were both teenagers: “Our first job together was spraying for dodder. He’s always been a bright guy; he’s very smart, very dedicated, and he always tries to do the job right, no matter what it is.” Both Bill and Fred also had high praise for his work during blueberry season back when Pine Island harvested those, as well. “He was our key guy in the field, in terms of managing the folks doing the harvesting,” Bill says.

Rick Zapata

“When you give him a job, he’s going to figure out the best way to do it,” Fred says. An excellent operator, Rick knows how to run every piece of equipment on the place, and what he doesn’t know, he’ll learn. “He’s always thinking,” Bill says. “And he’s never afraid to ask ‘why?'” When you challenge Rick, he will rise to the challenge. He also won’t shy away from new technology: when we started to run the new Gates Harrow, Rick quickly became the primary driver and was excited to wear the GoPro to show how the machine worked:

GoPro Gates Harrow from Pine Island Cranberry on Vimeo.

“He’s a pretty quiet guy, Rick is,” Fred says. “But he’s proud of his work; he’s proud of the farm and loves what he does. He’ll go home and tell his wife everything that goes on, how new equipment works, all of it.” And that goes both ways: “He’s a great employee, and we’re proud to have him,” Bill says. “I can’t believe it’s been forty years.”

Thanks, Rick, for everything you have done and for everything you continue to do. We say it a lot around here, but Rick genuinely embodies our core values of doing whatever it takes to help make this place better every day, and we’re glad he’s here!

A fond farewell

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Sometimes, the best thing about maintaining our blog is being able to talk to all the fantastic people who make up one of the best teams in the business. We have an entry up every week, but in the end, those entries are just words: it’s really our team who tells our story. And this week, we bid farewell to one of our greatest characters with the retirement of Bog Renovations Manager Joe Colon.

At a surprise lunch (beautifully planned by our fantastic admin Debra Signorelli), CEO Bill Haines thanked Joe for his 43 years of hard work. “There’s no job here that Joe hasn’t done,” he said. “I remember working with him in the packing house as shed boys; getting hollered at by the lady running it, getting hollered at by my dad. He’s improved a lot as a driver since then! And in the late 80s, when Howard Sprague [a long-time contractor] stopped building bogs, Joe started working on renovations, and by 1992 he was in charge of the team. It became his show. So many bogs that started out as blueberry fields were transformed on his watch, and then in 2005 we bought Sim Place. Everyone here knows the work we’ve been doing there.” Bill then continued with some mind-boggling numbers: “Since 1992, Joe has built or renovated 528 acres of bogs, installed 130 miles of irrigation pipe, moved over a million cubic yards of dirt, and installed about 10,000 sprinklers. He’s also installed about 550 gates; in fact, the first year we had Sim Place, we installed 117 gates in one year. Pretty impressive. All of that work is the model for what we’re going to do next: better bogs and better varieties, setting us up for the future. Joe has had a heck of a lot to do with all of that.”

GM Fred Torres then made a presentation, giving Joe a watch from the entire team. Joe was also presented with a framed photo, taken at Panama #1, and two first-class round-trip tickets to Puerto Rico. There were some great stories, a few tears, and a heartfelt thank you from the guest of honor, whom we are all going to miss enormously. Thank you, Joe, for everything you’ve done for Pine Island Cranberry. Bill Sr. thought the world of you, and so do we.

Until next year!

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Work on the renovation continues, but our team took a break in the middle of the week to celebrate a successful harvest and bid farewell to our seasonal team members until next year. The harvest lunch is always a good time, and this year CEO Bill Haines was especially pleased. “We learned a lot this year. We tried new tech and brought in the second biggest crop we’ve ever had: 316,000 barrels. And when you add up our working days, we did it on only 32 days. No one else can do that anywhere. And we also saw what the future looks like. Panama #6, our best renovated bed, is only four years old and had 493 barrels per acre. When you’re looking at the bogs we’re renovating now, you’re looking at our future. And our future is a great one, because we’re getting better at everything we do.”

He also had high praise for our team members in general. “Some of you leaving this week have been here since March, helping out with frost and everything else. You all did a great job with the harvest; you come back year after year to do whatever it takes, and we’re looking forward to seeing you next year. It’s been great to have you. And for our regular team: you all did a great job as well. Now we get to spend our winter building new bogs so we’re ready when these guys come back. We all learned how to do new things, and we’re going to keep doing that, because I know you’re up to it. I’m proud of our team: we have the best team in the industry, hands down, and it’s only the beginning.”

GM Fred Torres also had nothing but good things to say: “We really appreciate the help. Sometimes we ask these guys to come up last minute; we do try to give advance notice, but sometimes we need someone now, and they always show up. There are long hours during harvest, but we get through it and we appreciate their hard work and their time here. And we got a lot of work done after harvest in a very short time this fall, and we’re especially grateful for that.”

All three harvest team leaders, when asked about their crews, immediately answered that theirs was “the best”. Orange Team supervisor Gerardo Ortiz says: “They know what they have to do, and they do it. I trust them to do their job, and they trust me to be there if they need assistance.” Jeremy Fenstermaker agrees: “There is a strong element of trust, and these guys always have each other’s back. They’re hard workers.” Blue Team supervisor Matt Giberson: “We come together as a team, and we work hard as a team, and we do what needs to be done.” (And with Alberto Torres assigned to the Blue Team, Matt also thinks they have the edge on good food.)

With the help of such a fantastic team, Pine Island Cranberry continues to do everything we do better every day!

Season’s End

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Another year, another excellent harvest!

“A lot of good news this year,” says GM Fred Torres. “We broke records on all kinds of bogs this year: new bogs, old bogs, big ones, small ones. The berries were smaller this year, which means less weight and fewer barrels, but even with that we were able to increase the number of berries per acre we grew this year. That’s just fantastic.” A cooler August this year meant smaller fruit. “The berries need some heat in August,” he says. “But we had cooler temperatures this year than we normally do, which starts the color a little earlier and means they’re not going to grow anymore. But we’re still really happy with the crop; we can’t control the weather, but we did everything else we had to do when we had to do it and still brought in an average of over 236 barrels per acre. We can be proud of that.”

Another big triumph this year was the success of the Gates Harrow. “We’re very pleased with Gates Harrow and the time that it takes to do a bog,” Fred says. “Not rushing, just setting the normal pace the machine needs to run. And it picks clean.” The learning curve was a little steep at first, as you would expect. Team member Mickey Mercado had to learn how to move the ramps around as well as set them up for the machine; it has to be right so the tractor can easily turn around with as little overlap as possible. Fred says they got it down to a science: “By the end of the season, Rick [Zapata] couldn’t catch him. He would get to the end, and Mickey would be waiting already. If the guy on the tractor slows down, it’s going to slow down the guy who’s picking. At no time did Rick have to stop because he had to wait for Mickey. They both did really well.” Team members Joel DeJesus and Caesar Colon also put in some time on the new equipment, so when we eventually add another, we’ll have team members who are ready.

We also found out that we can run two crews with one Gates Harrow. “We have to manage the time well, but it can be done,” Fred says. During that particular experiment, the team members usually assigned to the smaller machines were able to do work elsewhere (such as bog clean-up after harvesting), making it an efficient use of time.

Best of all, everyone worked really well together. It can be tough; the crews are out there seven days a week for five weeks, and everyone gets tired toward the end. But we had a strong finish! “We set our target to finish by the end of the month, and we did,” says Fred. “We were done before the weekend and it was great! The weather was good, too. We had the one rough day, which was a little chilly with a lot of rain, but other than that it was good.” And we’re already using the season as a learning experience. “We’re always looking for ways to improve on the good stuff we already have: we have a great team, we have great equipment, but we can always challenge ourselves to do better. We know we can grow ‘em; we did it this year. But we have a lot of work to do this winter, and at the end of it, we’re going to come out of it working more efficiently than we ever have.”