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.
A Massachusetts photographer was seriously injured when he was stabbed during a wedding reception last month in Raymond, Maine.
Donald Halsing, 26, was hospitalized for five days after the stabbing on May 23. NBC affiliate News Center Maine reported that 26-year-old Andrew Manderson was arrested and charged with elevated aggravated assault.
Still recovering, Halsing told NBC10 Boston the attack came out of nowhere — one moment, he was snapping photos on the dance floor, while the next, he was searching for help as blood spilled onto his camera.
“I was sitting there in that chair thinking, ‘There’s a real possibility I could die here,’” Halsing said. “Immediately, I put my hand on my chest here to try and stop the bleeding, get some pressure on it, and started yelling for help.”
Halsing was working at the reception at the Kingsley Pine Campgrounds. He took his last photo at 9:01 p.m., minutes before the stabbing.
“One of the wedding guests came up to me and started asking questions about our business,” he said.
Halsing said it was nothing out of the ordinary, and he tried to explain his photography business to the inquiring guest through the pulse of the DJ booth and celebrating guests.
“I thought he was going to reach in his back pocket for his phone, and instead, he didn’t pull out his phone — he pulled out a pocket knife and stabbed me,” he said.
Manderson, who faced a judge days later, is a cousin of the bride.
“There was this look in his eyes that he wasn’t quite all there,” Halsing said.
Halsing’s fiancée, Ashley Wall, was feet away as he struggled to stay awake. She has been his photography partner for eight years since they met at Framingham State University, and she was helping him work the wedding.
“People who were around me, they asked, ‘What can we do to help you? What do you need?’ And I said, ‘Please go check on Ashley. Please go check on my fiancée,’” he recalled.
Halsing spent five days in the hospital suffering from two lacerations to his liver, ultimately developing a blood clot in his left leg. But the road to recovery exceeds his physical wounds as he contemplates his mental state when he resumes photography next year.
“I’m also worried about what lingering effects there might be,” he said. “If we get out on the dance floor and I start remembering what happened, I don’t know how I’m going to react.”
Halsing still doesn’t know why he was attacked.
Manderson was released on $50,000 bail and is due back in court in October.
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This story will be updated.
The Maine Department of Transportation is moving to slash up to $400 million in projects from its agenda, a shocking and abrupt cutback that is rattling the state’s construction industry at the start of building season.
Roughly $50 million across six pavement projects have already been delayed, according to a memo exclusively obtained by the Bangor Daily News. The agency plans to cut or delay another $150 million in bridge, highway, intersection and multimodal projects later this month. A further $200 million or more in cuts are planned in the next three-year work plan.
Those figures were outlined by Transportation Commissioner Dale Doughty in the May 18 memo to Gov. Janet Mills that has since circulated widely in the transportation sector, which has been getting drip-by-drip details on the wide scope of the cuts over the past three weeks.
It comes at the beginning of the state’s relatively narrow construction season. Companies have hired workers and ordered materials for projects they expected to begin this summer. The severity of the transportation budget problems was not raised to lawmakers during the 2026 legislative session.
Kelly Flagg, executive director of the Associated General Contractors of Maine, called the shortfall “deeply troubling” in a statement.
“We stand ready to work with policymakers, stakeholders, and industry partners to identify both immediate and long-term solutions,” Flagg said. “Maine cannot afford to fall further behind.”
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The cuts stem from a structural funding gap of at least $130 million in the state’s current work plan, according to Doughty’s memo. Losses are magnified because state money from the gas tax and other revenue sources is matched by federal funds. Lawmakers have long grappled with politically difficult long-term problems with the state’s transportation budget.
A Mills spokesperson said Wednesday morning that the administration was working on a response to questions from the BDN. The department says it needs roughly $240 million more in state capital funding annually to maintain the existing system, and that anything less than $200 million will erode it over time.
Doughty’s memo the only near-term solution is a series of bonds beginning as soon as possible. Lawmakers would have to return to Augusta to authorize that if one is going to appear on the November ballot.
The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Michael Capeci is the former chairman of the Bangor GOP.
Let’s be honest about Maine’s current state.
For many families, the cost of living has become unsustainable. Housing is out of reach for many young people. Energy bills keep rising. Many small businesses are struggling under taxes and regulations that make it harder to grow. Rural hospitals are under strain and despite years of increased state spending, the results are not showing up in people’s daily lives.
Concurrently, Maine continues to lose young workers to other states. That is not a statistic, it is a warning sign.
To me, the question in this Republican primary for governor is not about slogans. It is whether we continue with a political approach that has failed to reverse these trends, or whether we nominate someone with new ideas. I think that someone is Owen McCarthy.
Owen is not a political insider. He is an entrepreneur from Patten, a small town where opportunity is not assumed, it is built. He grew up in a working-class family, became the first in his family to graduate from college graduating from the University of Maine, and founded MedRhythms, a healthcare technology company focused on neurological treatment.
He didn’t just talk about opportunity. He built it. That distinction matters, because Maine’s problem is not a lack of debate it is a lack of results. We have seen the trajectory: higher costs, slower growth, and a steady outmigration of young workers. I believe Owen McCarthy represents a break from that pattern.
His Maine 2040 plan focuses on creating 50,000 new jobs in sectors where Maine has real advantages — maritime and defense, advanced forest products, and life sciences. These are export-driven industries tied directly to Maine’s workforce, geography, and institutions. What sets Owen apart is not only what he proposes, but how he approaches governing.
He prioritizes modernizing permitting so projects do not stall. He supports using technology to reduce costs and increase efficiency. He focuses on making it easier to build, hire, and expand in Maine.
That same practical mindset extends to healthcare. Expanding telehealth, strengthening EMS systems, improving provider flexibility, and shifting toward earlier intervention are not abstract reforms. They are system upgrades designed to improve access while controlling costs.
Maine voters consistently respond to competence. They reward candidates who understand problems and present plans to solve them. I believe they are tired of rhetoric that does not translate into results, and skeptical of politics that prioritizes messaging over execution.
Owen’s approach is grounded in solving the issues that shape daily life — affordability, healthcare access, job creation, and government efficiency. That is not just policy positioning. It is a governing model that speaks directly to voters.
Some will point to his lack of political experience. But I believe Maine’s core problems are not the result of insufficient political experience; they are the result of policies that have failed to deliver measurable improvement. Experience inside a broken system, by itself, is not a solution.
If Republicans want to win, this primary must be taken seriously. From my perspective, it is not about choosing a nominee for governor who can energize the base. It is about selecting someone who can compete in a broader electorate that is frustrated and looking for change.
That requires a candidate who can speak beyond the base, not by abandoning principles, but by demonstrating competence and a credible plan to address Maine’s challenges. I believe Owen McCarthy offers that combination. He represents a shift away from managed decline and toward economic execution.
This is not just another primary. It is a decision about whether Republicans position themselves to win Maine or whether they remain trapped in a cycle of repeating the same strategies and expecting different outcomes.
If Republicans want to compete for Maine’s future, they cannot afford to nominate a candidate who only motivates part of the electorate. They need someone who expands it.
I believe Owen McCarthy is that candidate.
And if the goal is to win Maine, then the choice should be unmistakable
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