Mainstreet Radio’s Leif Enger reports on Aitkin County farmers experimentation in establishing cranberry bogs for harvesting. Cranberries take deep pockets and sturdy patience; but now, after three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Aitkin County bogs are ready to produce.
SPEAKER: Want me to hook you up?
LEIF ENGER: This cranberry field used to be a rice paddy, and it still looks like one-- a diked rectangle of 4 acres on a tabletop landscape. It's planting day at 90 degrees. A yellow tractor is dumping bales of wet cranberry vines onto dry sand, while workers in swimsuits or overalls rake them out thin. Cranberries are a novel crop in this part of the world. Like the vines, the crew is a little green.
KIM CRAMER: They're way too thick, you guys. You got to thin them out a lot more than that.
LEIF ENGER: Kim Cramer refers most cranberry questions to her husband, Duane, who's driving the tractor. But after three years, she knows her vines. Coming along behind the crew is a disc implement that will give the wet plants a proper start.
KIM CRAMER: Well, those blades there are 3 inches apart. And they're pushing the vine 2 inches in. Then there's a big roller right behind the blades, which is going over the top. And that's just actually packing the vine down in. That's all it does.
LEIF ENGER: All this might seem simple-- small plots, hand labor. But it's actually a costly and ongoing experiment. The farm is owned by AD Makepeace, a Massachusetts-based company. And it's the best established of several operations trying to expand the cranberry industry into Minnesota.
Makepeace has spent $30,000 an acre developing these bogs, hauling in peat and sand for the vines to grow in, establishing reservoirs, and installing pumps and culverts to manipulate water from the Mississippi. The vines alone cost $4,000 a ton, soaking wet. And every acre takes a ton and a half. Up on the tractor, manager Duane Cramer says he'll be relieved if the bogs can just produce that long-awaited first crop this fall.
DUANE CRAMER: They've been a little slow, taking off. We've got another 30 acres ready for planting next spring. So hopefully, it goes good. It will be a boost for the economics. It takes a lot of people, as you can see right here. We're working on a little 2-acre piece here. And we've probably got close to 20 people running around here.
LEIF ENGER: The area needs the jobs. Aitkin County is persistently at or near bottom of the per capita income scale. But there's a lot of caution about cranberries. For one thing, they've never been grown commercially this far north. Also, these bogs formerly produced wild rice, a specialty crop that raised all kinds of expectations in the '70s, only to have the market wilt. Could the same thing happen to cranberries?
KEVIN EDBERG: Anybody who's going to put that kind of money into developing a cranberry bog had better have a very, very, very sound idea of where they're going to be selling their product, or they're nuts.
LEIF ENGER: Kevin Edberg is assistant marketing director for the state ag department. Having watched the hype and crash of many a specialty crop, he believes cranberries are stable. Wild rice, for example, never claimed much cooler space at gas stations.
He says the question isn't the durability of the market but whether a company has access to it. Most of the cranberries grown in this country are bought and sold by the Ocean Spray cooperative. Growers who belong to Ocean Spray have huge advantages over those who don't.
KEVIN EDBERG: You have a wider number of consumers that are using your product on a daily basis. You have more than one or two major buyers of the product. And to that extent, you are a smaller player in a bigger market. And that reduces risk.
LEIF ENGER: AD Makepeace does belong to Ocean Spray. However, its risk is still large. While the company tries to establish itself in Minnesota, competitors in Wisconsin, already the biggest cranberry-producing state, are expanding rapidly. In the Aitkin County bogs, crewman Richard Cook, a former dairy farmer, says the product might be different, but the situation feels familiar.
RICHARD COOK: Well, everybody's getting into it. It's just like the dairy business. Everybody got into it. And what'd they do to it? It soured up. They got greedy and wanted a bigger price. The first thing I know, it went to hell. That's what's going to happen to this, too.
LEIF ENGER: AD Makepeace hopes to ship its first Minnesota cranberries this fall. Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio.
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