DRESDEN

“Tart” might be the first word that comes to mind when cranberries are mentioned, followed by remembrances of last year’s Thanksgiving dinner. “Complex” might be the descriptor on farmers’ tongues, though, as the berry has a recent history of sweet and sour seasons.

A glut on the market took a toll on some of Maine’s cranberry farmers last year, and an unpredicted frost in mid-September claimed the lion’s share of the harvest at Popp Farm in Dresden this year, according to owner David Popp.

The U-Pick season for cranberries is still open at Popp Farm, but the majority of the farm’s 4 acres of cranberries, which are usually harvested and trucked down to Decas Cranberry Products Inc. in Massachusetts, will remain on the vine this year, said Popp.

“This year is a bust — I didn’t expect to have a frost Sept. 18 that was cold enough to kill a cranberry,” said Popp, noting that the weather report had predicted a low temperature of 34 degrees. “You generally don’t expect a hard frost until October, and by that time your cranberries have enough sugars in the berries so they don’t freeze until it gets to about 25 degrees.”

Indigenous to bog and marsh lands of northeastern North America, cranberries are low-laying woody perennials that root from runners growing horizontally across the soil’s surface. Though cranberries historically were harvested from wetlands across Maine, farmers now typically construct upland bogs to recreate the plant’s favored environment.

By early October, the berries have ripened fully and farmers use the irrigated bogs both to protect the berries from colder temperatures and to harvest them.

“Ordinarily I’d have my sprinklers out there and I’d run them at night to keep a little irrigation water on them,” said Popp.

“When you put water on them at low temperatures, ice forms and you have what in physics is called the ‘latent heat of fusion,’” he said. “When water moves from a liquid to solid state it has to give up a certain amount of heat and the heat produced is enough to keep the berry from freezing — you can keep them from freezing down to 20 degrees.”

Cranberries are harvested by two methods, said Popp: a wet or dry harvest. Dry harvested berries can be sold fresh, but the process is slower and more of the yield is lost than with a wet harvest.

“This is a Darlington dry harvester,” said Popp, leaning on a device that looked like a hybrid walk behind lawnmower and wool carding machine. “These teeth here comb the berries off and they go up an elevator here into a wooden box in the back,” he said, pointing between a maze of belts and rollers.

The dry harvester covers a 3-and-a-half foot swathe, said Popp, and harvests about 65 percent of the berries it passes over.

“The berries it doesn’t get, it mashes up,” said Popp. “You lose a lot right there on a dry harvest.

“For a wet harvest, what we do is we go through and flood the bogs with water and that floats the berries,” Popp continued. “You come through with a water reel and the reel knocks them off the vine and they float up, then you start at the other end with a boom and we pull the whole works up to one corner.”

The bogs are then pumped out and excess leaves are siphoned off while the berries are separated out on a trailer. Wet harvested berries are not suitable for fresh fruit, but are used in processing.

“There are a number of things that they get out of cranberries,” said Popp. “They’ll squeeze them and get the concentrate out, the seeds they can extract and press to make a cranberry oil and some of the pulp they use to make a cranberry nutraceutical.

“What’s left is the skin and maybe a little bit of pulp, and those are dried, sweetened and sold as Craisins,” he said. “Like a pig factory, the only thing they don’t use is the squeal.”

The price per barrel plummeted two years ago, said Popp, when a bumper crop of cranberries from Wisconsin flooded the market, driving the price down.

It costs more than $3,000 to send the crop to Decas in Massachusetts, said Popp. In 1996, when Popp started growing cranberries, the return on a barrel of cranberries, roughly 100-pounds, was as high as $90. Currently, a barrel costs approximately $10, or 10 cents per pound.

“You can’t make any money on that, you can’t even afford to harvest them at that price,” said Popp. “We didn’t send any down last year and we won’t send any down this year. Next year, if the price goes up, we may try to harvest three beds, but we won’t try any more than that.”

The price for U-Pick cranberries has also been reduced to $1 per pound, said Popp, because the early frost damaged the most easily accessible berries making it slower going for pickers. For avid cranberry fans and locavores, the work may be well worth the reward.

“I tell people it has to be hard as a rock — if there is any softness to it, don’t pick it, just leave it,” said Popp. “I wasn’t planning on much of a harvest this year anyway. If we get nothing, we get nothing. That’s the situation.”

For more information about Popp Farm, located at 151 Popp Road in Dresden, and for U-Pick hours, contact David Popp at 737-4352 or email [email protected].