Cranberry Harvests In Plymouth County

As Thanksgiving draws near, we got down and dirty in the bogs so we could equip you with enough knowledge to dominate cranberry discussion.

Cranberries grow in cooler Northern Hemisphere climates. The Southern Hemisphere also tries. 98% of the world's cranberries are grown the US, Canada and Chile.

Wisconsin has supplanted long-time champ Massachusetts as the leading cranberry grower.

However, I would point out that if your Thanksgiving cranberries aren't from Massachusetts, your table is wiggedy wiggedy whack.

We bear no grudge towards Wisconsin, but Thanksgiving is a Plymouth thing, most Massachusetts cranberries are grown in Plymouth County and this sort of sets Massachusetts atop the cranberry hierarchy.

Ocean Spray, based in Massachusetts, doesn't miss the mark with their commercials. Cranberries are indeed harvested by guys in hip waders, wielding rakes. The big difference between the commercials and reality is that real workers are too busy to stop and talk shop with the cameraman.

Cranberries need all of summer and autumn to grow, and the harvest is usually a race against the killing frost. If the frost beats the harvesting, they have to fly a helicopter about 5 feet over the bogs to keep the water from freezing.

Bogs look like this, but have to be flooded to loosen the berries. More on that below...

Bogs look cool with fog over them.

The lack of ambient lighting sort of dulls the cranberry colors. When judging how bland this picture is, know that it was worse before we edited it.

We were going to do a Fog Bog article, but Facebook spamming is high risk, so it's easier/safer to just have a Fog Bog section of a larger Cranberry article.

750 acres produces literal truckloads of cranberries. They are sent off to an Ocean Spray receiving plant in Carver. 

Cranberries are closely related to the Blueberry and the (I'm your) Huckleberry. The English settlers of Massachusetts originally called them Bearberries, as local bears would fatten on them before hibernating. Cranberry was settled on because the shrubs and berries supposedly resembled a crane to German/Dutch farmers in New England. They called it a Kranberre, and the English translation stuck. This crane thing may be true for people with better cameras.

It takes a truck of equal size enirely filled with sugar to make cranberry sauce. Cranberries are impossibly tart, and they require tons of sweetener. You'd need about a box truck worth of vodka to make a Paul Bunyan-sized Cape Codder.

Native 'Mericans had the first crack at cranberries, which they used for pemmican and dye. They called them sasemineash. The first English reference of them dates back to 1550. The first cranberry sauce recipe dates back to a 1663 Pilgrim cookbook. A 1672 book described them as "excellent against the Scurvy."

Revolutionary War vet Henry Hall of Dennis, Massachusetts started a bog in 1816, and he was shipping them commercially as far as Europe by the 1820s.

In 2017, the world harvested 625,181 tons of cranberries. The US produced 379,745 of those tons. Canada and Chile split most of the remainder about equally between them. Wisconsin produces 65% of the US total, while tiny Massachusetts produces 23%.

95% of cranberries are used to make either sauce or juice. Cranberry sauce is part of the traditional English Christmas dinner, as well as Christmas and Thanksgiving in the US of A.

Ocean Spray, which controls about 65% of the market,  fights against a holiday-only bias regarding cranberries. They have relentlessly developed new recipes and marketing strategies to get people to consume them regularly. A 1959 herbicide scare collapsed the market, forcing companies to try to market them year-round.

This effort brought us cranberry juice and cranapple juice. Cranapple was invented by Ed Gelsthorpe (a remarkable guy who has his fingerprints on the first roll-on deodorant, snack-pack pudding, frozen yogurt and the Manwich). Ocean Spray also developed the Cape Codder and the Cosmopolitan.

A.D. Makepeace, who were nice enough to let me shoot pictures of their operations, is the largest producer of cranberries in the world. They may be the largest property owners in Wareham, Carver and Middleboro, but I have no documentation to back that up. They, along with other local growers, were original members of the Ocean Spray cooperative in 1930.

Beatles fans familiar with the Paul Is Dead conspiracy theory point to the song Strawberry Fields Forever as proof. The end of the song has John Lennilon saying something along the lines of "I buried Paul." Lennon claims he was saying "cranberry sauce." Keeping it musical, cranberries are what the singer(s) of the Waitresses forgot to buy in their song Christmas Wrapping. They go out to the A&P to get some, meet a guy and the song ends happily.

Once the bogs are flooded, a thresher like this one is used to loosen the berries. They are then fed to a truck after being raked up by those Ocean Spray commercial guys.

The European Union is the largest importer of American cranberries, followed by China, Canada, Mexico and South Korea. China, who imported $36 million in cranberry products, is zooming up the list. I am not aware if the Trump/China trade war hurt cranberry growers or made them eligible for the series of farmer bailouts that the trade war produced.

Mann Farms of Buzzards Bay also let me roam around.

Cranberry prices peaked at $65 a barrel in 1996, before plummeting to $18 a barrel in 2001. Production outpaced demand.

Happy Thanksgiving!