Maine
From drought to severe storms, climate change is a challenge for Maine’s iconic wild blueberries – The Boston Globe
The bountiful harvest — a boon for Wyman’s and the other 484 wild blueberry growers in the region — was a month early this summer.
Growers were ready for it, though, staying laser-focused on changing climate patterns and extreme weather events for the past several years. Cultivators of the wild blueberry, a species only commercially farmed in Maine and eastern Canada, have transformed their growing practices to deal with more heat and swings in precipitation, conducting research on their fields in real time and adjusting timing, fertilizer, and irrigation year after year.
“The crop adapted to the climate in a certain way [over time], but now we’re seeing this rapid change,” Tooley said. “We’ve had to become more flexible and more adaptive in how we manage this crop, and respond to climate change to help the plant thrive.”
Nearby in the field, hand pickers in long pants and wide-brimmed hats swung metal rakes low to the ground, pulling up the fresh berries from patches that sprouted about ankle-high. Meanwhile in the neighboring town of Cherryfield, widely considered the wild blueberry capital of the world, other Wyman’s farmers steered tractor-sized mechanical pickers back and forth across the fields, yanking up blueberry shrubs and catapulting the berries onto a conveyor belt that shuttled them into crates.
The wild blueberry industry contributes over $360 million to Maine’s economy each year, according to the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine. Wyman’s alone, one of the state’s larger operations, employs roughly 300 people year around; employment numbers vary for the other approximately 500 growers.
Unlike the high-bush blueberries found in supermarkets across America, wild (or low-bush) blueberries are not planted; rather they spread on their own through underground roots that farmers carefully manage to encourage their growth.
A resilient plant that can grow everywhere from mountaintops and rocky cliffs to sandier coastline soil, wild blueberries don’t need tilling, and typically don’t require much care at all beyond biennial pruning and swarms of honeybees trucked in to help the plants bear fruit. (Wild blueberries are biennials, meaning the plants produce fruit every other year.) Even during difficult years marked by frost or drought, Tooley said, the plants self-regulate to some extent, with “better pollinator efficacy in fields with more damage.”
Even so, research indicates that the region’s blueberry barrens, places where the fruit naturally grows, are warming faster than the rest of the state. And as the climate becomes not just hotter, but more unpredictable, growers like Wyman’s are increasingly investing resources into predicting future weather conditions, and tending to plants with ever more attention to ensure the fruit makes it to harvest.
“Climate adaptation and mitigation planning … is the challenge of our time. If we want to have a functioning and healthy agricultural system in this country and around the world, we have to be thinking about this,” said Rachel Schattman, a former vegetable farmer and sustainable agriculture professor at the University of Maine, who is working with Wyman’s to model the impact of weather patterns on wild blueberry production.
“If you apply climate change to a market setting … it’s becoming more and more something that farmers think about a lot, and they understand it affects their business a tremendous amount,” she added. “People used to say, ‘My grandfather always started harvest on the first week of August.’ No questions asked, that’s just when the harvest starts. But that’s not reliable anymore.”
Tooley said the shift away from the “calendar method” is industrywide; instead, she and other farmers and ecologists are in the fields multiple times a week throughout the spring, even tagging specific plants to closely study them for signs of buds preparing to flower, and flowers preparing to bear fruit. This year, the harvest in Downeast Maine started in early July and is expected to wrap up weeks before its usual end in mid-September.
While summer weather has varied sharply in recent years — with 2020 and 2022 marked by drought, then a deluge of rain last year — Tooley pointed to three major trends in berry growth that farmers have noticed in the past decade: a longer, earlier growing season, warmer temperatures, and more precipitation. And though that may sound like good news for the harvest, those conditions can harm the blueberry plants, which respond in real time to changing weather patterns.
For example, Tooley said she’s repeatedly observed what ecologists are calling “fall bloom” during unseasonably warm autumns, when the shrubs mistake the heat for springtime weather and begin to flower six months early. Those buds are then damaged during winter frost, reducing the amount of fruit the plant is able to produce the following year. Similarly, “snowpack,” or a layer of compressed snow over the ground, historically protected the low-growing plant from harsh winds and severe cold temperatures. But with less snowfall in recent years, the plants are forced to face the winter elements.
Growers are limited in what they can do to protect the vast acres of land during the colder months, but once spring hits, Tooley said, her team kicks into high gear to try and simulate “normal” growing conditions as much as possible.
“We’re definitely bringing in bees earlier than we used to … and irrigating more,” she explained. “The plant is doing everything it can to ripen and reproduce, and we have to give it everything it needs to keep going.”
Each year holds lessons for the next one. After the first year of intense drought, for example, growers introduced a nitrogen-based fertilizer to the help the soil retain moisture on hotter days. And because of last year’s heavy rainfall, when many of the berries were soggy from overwatering, Tooley said that this year the team is careful to pull back on irrigation on rainy days and adjust the frequency of watering to be more often on sunny ones.
Of course, it all leads up to the first day of harvest, which kicks off a period of nonstop berry collection. And if they get it right, berries abound — so many that harvesters don’t need to worry about crushing a few shrubs in the process.
“We work all year — for two whole years — to make this happen, then we have four weeks to get it out of the ground,” Tooley said. “A lot of people’s livelihoods rely on this, and while we trust the resiliency of the crop, we also want to give it the resources to help it flourish and continue to sustain the people that depend on it.”
Ivy Scott can be reached at ivy.scott@globe.com. Follow her @itsivyscott.
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Maine
Sports Digest: Southern Maine women’s lacrosse coach Angela Mallis steps down
![Sports Digest: Southern Maine women’s lacrosse coach Angela Mallis steps down Sports Digest: Southern Maine women’s lacrosse coach Angela Mallis steps down](https://www.pressherald.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2024/01/USM-logo-1704845116.jpg?w=209)
COLLEGES
University of Southern Maine women’s lacrosse coach Angela Mallis has resigned after four seasons, the school announced in a press release.
Mallis went 34-27 with the Huskies from 2018-2020. She was named interim coach for the 2021 season and led the Huskies to a 6-3 record. The interim tag was removed after the season.
Ashley Durepo, who coached at Southern Maine from 2018-2020, will replace Mallis. Durepo went 20-16 in her first stint with the Huskies and was named Little East Conference Coach of the Year in 2019. Upon leaving USM, Durepo coached at Merrimack College for 2021 season. She was also the head coach at Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire in 2022, an assistant coach at Southern New Hampshire University in 2023 and an assistant at Falmouth High in 2024.
TELEVISION
STREAMING: The launch of Venu Sports will be delayed after a federal judge granted FuboTV’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the planned sports streaming venture by ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery.
U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Garnett in the Southern District of New York said in her 69-page ruling that Fubo was likely to be successful in proving during a trial that the joint venture would violate antitrust laws, and Fubo and consumers would “face irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction.”
ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery said they would appeal the ruling.
FuboTV filed the lawsuit two weeks after ESPN, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and Hulu announced their plan to offer a sports streaming service on Feb. 6.
FOOTBALL
NFL: Cincinnati Bengals kicker Evan McPherson has agreed to a three-year, $16.5 million contract extension, eliminating any chance of him hitting free agency in March.
McPherson, who earned the nickname “Money Mac” because of his penchant for making clutch kicks, will earn $10 million in new money in 2025, according to his agents at New York-based Sportstars Inc. That’s nearly 10 times his base salary of $1,055,000 for 2024.
A fifth-round draft pick from Florida in 2021, McPherson has made 78 of 93 field-goal attempts in three seasons. He’s hit 21 of those from beyond 50 yards and is 126 of 132 on extra points.
GOLF
WOMEN’S SCOTTISH OPEN: American golfer Megan Khang birdied her final hole to shoot 4-under 68 and join Minjee Lee of Australia in a share of the lead at the Women’s Scottish Open in Irvine, Scotland.
Both players were 8 under par overall and seeking their first wins of 2024.
They were two shots clear of three players – Olympic gold medalist Lydia Ko (69), Charley Hull of England (68) and Lauren Coughlin of the United States (69).
AUTO RACING
OBIT: Scott Bloomquist, a dirt track race car driver who was known for his bravado and for being one of the sport’s best, died in a plane crash on his family’s farm in Mooresburg, Tennessee, friends and local officials said.
Bloomquist, 60, stood out with his long hair and a race car that was emblazoned with the number zero and a skull and crossbones. He was also known for winning.
TENNIS
CINCINNATI OPEN: Carlos Alcaraz repeatedly smashed his racket on the court in a rare show of frustration, and the four-time Grand Slam winner fell to Gael Monfils 4-6, 7-6 (7-5), 6-4 in Cincinnati.
In a match that was suspended by rain on Thursday night with the players in a second-set tiebreaker, the 37-year-old Monfils advanced by taking the last two sets from the second-seeded Alcaraz, who called the loss his “worst match.”
In women’s action, top-ranked Iga Swiatek advanced to the quarterfinals with a convincing 6-2, 6-2 win over Marta Kostyuk.
Maine
Opinion: Maine DOE should not be stirring fear of AI
![Opinion: Maine DOE should not be stirring fear of AI Opinion: Maine DOE should not be stirring fear of AI](https://www.pressherald.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2024/08/OpenAI_New_AI_Model_13983_77998d-1723738768.jpg?w=1000)
Last week, I spent three days at the Maine Department of Education’s annual educator summit. I attended because I wanted to see how teachers were being trained and what initiatives the Department would introduce this year. What I saw there shocked me.
The department is scaring teachers into believing that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will render the subjects they teach obsolete, and that the education system must be reimagined to teach and measure soft skills that cannot be automated away, like adaptability, empathy and problem solving.
Over the next month, the MDOE is hosting community meetings across Maine where they will introduce these ideas under the banner of “Measure What Matters: What Makes a Great School in Maine?” I attended one of these meetings alongside a group of teachers at the summit. The facilitator started by asking the group, “What is something you had in school that doesn’t exist anymore?” Teachers mentioned things like cursive writing, home economics and rote memorization.
Then, the facilitator played us a video showing various jobs whose workers had been replaced by robots and AI. We saw a montage of self-driving trucks; automated restaurants, farms and factories; drone deliveries; and robot surgeons, all set to ominous violin music. The facilitator herself acknowledged that this video routinely invoked fear in viewers.
Given this world of rapid automation and technological change, we were told, schools must change too. It no longer makes sense to have traditional, siloed subjects like English, math and science. Instead, schools should teach broader skills: creativity, social intelligence and entrepreneurship. Subject knowledge no longer makes sense because students can just Google or ChatGPT answers to questions.
We were also told that schools need to do away with “old smart,” defined as what you know and how much you know, and replace it with “new smart” defined as students’ capacity to “not know” and “continuously stress-test their beliefs about how the world works.” Perhaps George Orwell should have been clearer that 1984 was a cautionary tale, not a guidebook.
These themes were echoed by MDOE Commissioner Pender Makin in her keynote address at the summit. She told us that “change is so rapidly advancing that we can’t with any confidence predict what the world is going to be like,” warning of a deluge of information and misinformation churned out by generative AI. She spoke of the societal need for “bold, self-directed entrepreneurial creators and makers who can think on their feet.”
Let me be clear: There is no reason to turn our backs on traditional education practices because of advances in AI. Literacy, numeracy, knowledge and wisdom remain – and will remain – the most important skills teachers can impart to our children.
We should, by all means, teach students to use new AI tools in a safe and effective manner. But the idea that technological progress requires the abandonment of common-sense academics and quantitative measures of school success is science fiction.
What the MDOE’s new dystopian turn is meant to conceal, quite obviously, is that Maine schools have been rapidly declining by any objective metric. The department’s own numbers show that 35% of students score below state expectations in English, 51% score below in math, and 64% score below in science.
Once a top-ranked state on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Maine’s lackluster performance in recent years has prompted the department to try to discredit the test. Maine even ranked last in the U.S. News and World Report’s 2024 state high-school rankings, with only two Maine schools in the top 25% nationally.
It’s not AI, robots or automation that are threats to our students succeeding in a technologically sophisticated future. It’s a department that is willing to abandon tried and true educational methods and metrics for new-age platitudes and futurist fantasies. Their experimental programs have not worked in the past, and they will not work now. Instead, Maine students will fall further behind on the fundamental knowledge and skills they need to succeed.
Maine
Home prices have risen a whopping 79% in five years in this state — and it’s nowhere near Florida or Texas
![Home prices have risen a whopping 79% in five years in this state — and it’s nowhere near Florida or Texas Home prices have risen a whopping 79% in five years in this state — and it’s nowhere near Florida or Texas](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/newspress-collage-8l9u1480g-1723766901143.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&1723752646&w=1024)
The cold never bothered them anyway.
Homebuyers are grabbing their winter gear and flocking to far-flung Maine — where they’ve managed to drive up the median home price a bone-chilling 78.5% in just five short years, a new report reveals.
According to freshly published findings from industry news site Pro Tool Reviews, The Pine Tree State has experienced the most significant increase in median home prices of any of the fifty since 2019 — jumping from $219,000 to $391,000.
The explosive growth comes in spite of the fact that Maine’s population has trickled upward a mere 0.32% since 2008, according to research conducted by Pew Charitable Trust — well below states like Texas (1.52%) and Florida (1.34%), better known for their heated housing markets in recent years.
Maine’s tiny capital, Augusta, experienced the most dramatic change, according to the report.
Neighboring New Hampshire slid into second place on the list, experiencing a 76.4% rise in average residential real estate prices since 2019.
The new wave of northern New England homesteaders don’t appear to be struggling to make their purchases either — The Granite State ranked highest for size of downpayment, boasting $72,750 on average.
Another state in the region took third place on the overall list — Rhode Island, which experienced a 73% jump.
Meanwhile, the most affordable state for homebuyers right now is Louisiana, where the median home price is just $254,000, researchers revealed.
Texas took second place, followed by Oklahoma, Mississippi and Indiana rounding out the top five.
In determining what “most affordable” means, Pro Tool Reviews took into account not just the median home price (in which case Oklahoma would take first, with its $240,300 median price tag) but also the average salary, average down payment and the amount of homes in the state that sell for more than their asking price.
“Only 13% of homes in Louisiana sell for over the list price,” the report analysis commented of the Bayou State, where the average salary is $54,134.08,
“This represents the fourth-lowest figure of all states analyzed — 27.3% of homes in the state have their list price lowered before being sold,” researchers said.
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