Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [117]
With all the built-in checks on growing organically—labor costs, lack of processing facilities, the relative inefficiency of dry harvest—the good news is that organic berries command around three times the price of conventional fruit. That’s especially important since cranberries are one crop where organic yields simply can’t compete with conventional. The Keeses feel great when they get sixty barrels of Early Blacks per acre, while conventional growers get up to two hundred. Still, it’s worth remembering that the Keeses are doing way better than anybody was in 1900, when the national average hovered around fifteen. Sanding, mechanical harvest, and near-religious weeding give them a yield that old-time growers would have killed for; coupled with the premium many are willing to pay for their product, it’s been enough to keep them going for nearly twenty years.
The Keeses’ converted garage has fishing rods in the rafters, a dartboard, an old iron stove, a pool table covered with plywood to create a workspace—and a pair of cranberry separators from the 1930s. Made of beautiful, polished wood, the separators consist of a series of downward-angled shelves; good, ripe cranberries are hard enough to bounce off all seven and onto a conveyor belt for packaging, while soft fruit slips down below to be discarded. The bounce method, the story goes, was invented by a New Jersey grower known—appropriately—as Peg Leg John Webb; Peg Leg John evidently tired of carrying cranberries down stairs for packing and so started simply rolling them down the stairs. Today it’s the last step before the berries go into half-pound packs for individual shipments all over the country.
Though what Robert and Kristine do here is enormously appealing, there are clearly at least a few things that might stop more growers from converting to organic. There’s the price of weeding, which would be astronomical on larger bogs (though “larger” here is relative—the average grower for the dominant Ocean Spray cooperative has less than twenty acres of bogs, compared to the Keeses’ six), and there aren’t ever going to be enough woofers to go around. There are the much lower yields, which must be unnerving for a conventional grower to accept. And, most important, there’s the fact that the entire cranberry distribution system is structured toward selling conventional fruit. Between weeding, dry harvesting, and selling all the product, organic farming is just much more work.
But, tempting as it might be to lionize organic agriculture, when I talk to Hilary Sandler, project manager of integrated pest management at the Cranberry Station research center, she immediately explodes my clean mental dichotomy. Before 1983, it’s true, growers would simply spray broad-band pesticides, wiping out all insect life. Most sprayed based on the calendar instead of observation, applying their chemicals without regard for what was actually happening in the bogs. And that’s a hard habit to break; as Kristine put it, some third-generation growers “get real nervous when May fifteenth comes around and they’re not putting anything on the crop.”
But spraying by the calendar is exactly what integrated pest management, or IPM, is designed to stop. “Ultimately, it’s a philosophy,” Hilary says. “The idea is to consider both the environmental and social effects of what we’re doing.” The most important part of that philosophy is probably the willingness to absorb a certain amount of loss, to give up the idea that everything has to be controlled from the start. Instead of trying to destroy all pests before they can do any damage at all to vines or fruit, IPM growers spray only after a given pest rises above a certain