Weather’s ‘wild’ for state blueberries

By MILES JACKSON
AFP Correspondent

HAMMONTON — With more than half century of blueberry growing expertise between them, Dennis Doyle and Nicholi Varsa have seen seasons with weather hot, cold, wet and dry.
But this year has inflicted extremes in all four of weather conditions upon New Jersey’s blueberry growers in of the nation’s largest blueberry production areas, said Doyle and Varsa,
“Wild,” said Varsa, director of the Rutgers University Philip E. Marucci Center for Blueberry and Cranberry Research. “I’ve been in this business a long time and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a season like this one.”
For Doyle, general manager of Atlantic Blueberry Co., at about 1,300 acres the world’s largest cultivated blueberry farm, the weather inflicted a little damage to this year’s blueberry harvest which brings more than $60 million in receipts in New Jersey, making it by far the Garden State’s most profitable crop.
“Our season’s going to end early in early August,” Doyle said. “The market’s holding up pretty well and the quality is good, but the berries won’t last as long as we’d like them to.”
The total yield may be slightly lower than last years 53 million pounds of blueberries, Doyle said.
“We’re a pretty resilient group and quality is holding up. So we’re going to get through this year just like any other year,” Doyle said.
But Doyle admitted that the year started on an ominous note with heavy snows that weighed down the top branches of the blueberry bushes, which can reach six foot in height, exposing delicate buds forming on the lower and inner branches.
“It threatened bud dehydration by exposing the inner buds to the cold winds” Doyle said. “We don’t get many 24-inch snows in New Jersey and this was just the start.”
A May 10 freeze hit some growers hard, killing anywhere from 10 to 90 percent of all blueberry flowers which were wide open at the time.
Varsa said low humidity and dew point created a unique set of circumstances for the blueberries at their most vulnerable point.
“It’s called a black frost because what we think of as frost doesn’t really form because of the low humidity,” Varsa said. “But it still damaged the crop in the lowest lying fields.”
Next was a cool, wet early spring that kept workers and machinery out of the fields. And, seemingly overnight, the weather turned hot and dry, keeping growers busy irrigating fields just as the berries were beginning to size and ripen.
Both Doyle and Varsa said weather conditions led to the earliest growing season in memory.
“And that means we’ll end or harvest early, two to three weeks before we usually finish up,” Doyle said.
The record heat of June and July has posted a problem for growers who work to keep berries from dehydrating, but Doyle said the hot weather actually has been the least of their problems.
“We get the berries out of the field as soon as they’re picked,” Doyle said. “The quality has held up and the market is pretty good right now. We’re pretty happy with the way things are turning out.”
But the early harvest shines a light on the long term challenges for the New Jersey growers where blueberries were first cultivated 100 years ago this year.
As more states and even other regions of the world grow new varieties of berries that do well in hot weather, Varsa and Doyle said New Jersey’s growers are getting national and even international competition.
“The early harvest puts our market on an overlap with other states” Varsa said.
About 6,500 acres of blueberries were planted in Washington, Oregon and North Carolina during 2002 while New Jersey added 300 acres.
Chile and Argentina had increased their imports to the United States by more than 51 million pounds between 2003 and 2008, according to USDA figures.