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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.
Politics
Our political journalists are based in the Maine State House and have deep source networks across the partisan spectrum in communities all over the state. Their coverage aims to cut through major debates and probe how officials make decisions. Read more Politics coverage here.
A Maine Republican Party online survey on the gubernatorial primary has sparked frustration and exposed divisions among the crowded field just a week before the party aims to project unity at its convention in Augusta.
Multiple campaigns told the Bangor Daily News they were not aware of the poll in advance or had not received the survey in an email sent out widely by the party last week. The campaigns said the survey’s timing and the fact that not every candidate had the chance to work the poll and vote for themselves sent the wrong message.
Former fitness executive Ben Midgley won the straw poll, which the party noted was not scientific. His campaign cited the nearly 32% support as a sign of rising momentum in a race that’s been led so far by lobbyist and former federal official Bobby Charles. Charles came in second at almost 30%, and entrepreneur Jonathan Bush came in third at 13%.
Charles has led previous polls without spending nearly as much on advertising as Bush or groups backing lobbyist and former Maine Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason. Midgley was among a large group of candidates stuck in the single digits in a survey released in March by Pan Atlantic Research.
Staffers at two campaigns said there was briefly talk of boycotting the convention after the poll. Delegates are poised to gather over Friday and Saturday at Augusta Civic Center, where the party says another straw poll is planned.
Mason said he did not see the survey in his email but acknowledged it may have been received by his team without it getting up the chain.
“It probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do for party unity,” Mason said. “It’s not the best look.”
Vincent Harris, a Charles spokesperson, said the campaign “did not push or promote this straw poll to a single person.” He said the campaign was unaware of the survey until Midgley’s release.
“As Republicans, we believe voter integrity is important and yet there was no clarity here,” he added.
Entrepreneur Owen McCarthy’s campaign was also not aware of the online stroll poll until after results were released. A spokesman for the campaign called it “unfortunate that with the convention right around the corner, the whole process has been tainted by the perception that party insiders are trying to foist their preferred candidate onto grassroots primary voters.”
Jason Savage, executive director of the Maine GOP, said the party believed all the candidates had received the poll, but “we take everybody at their word that says they didn’t receive it.”
He and a spokesperson for the Bush campaign also separately noted that the straw poll was discussed during a pre-convention Zoom meeting, and he said it went to the party’s entire email list. The poll went to at least two BDN email addresses.
Savage emphasized that the convention poll would be “one person, one vote” per delegate.
“Everything in a few days is going to be about the convention,” he said. “Everybody is invited to compete and do their best and see how they can do.”
More than 200 Fort Fairfield Middle High School students, staff and administrators filed into the school’s gym on April 8 for an anti-bullying assembly.
On stage, surrounded by neon tube lights, was the Icon Dance Team, a New York-based troupe that travels to schools around the U.S. dancing and singing to radio hits interspersed with messages about self-respect and standing up for others.
Parents were notified of the performance in advance, MSAD 20 Superintendent Melanie Blais said. No one contacted the district afterward to complain.
But six days later, on April 14, the conservative influencer Libs of TikTok blasted a series of posts about the performance — and its lead dancer — to its millions of social media followers and accused the district of “openly grooming” its students.
“This is what schools are pushing on your children using our tax dollars,” one caption reads. “SHUT THEM DOWN.”
Commenters tagged the U.S. Department of Justice and called Maine a “demonic” state. Some encouraged violence against one of the dancers.
District officials insist the performance focused only on encouraging positive self-esteem and counteracting bullying. And despite the recent furor on social media, they say local people have shared no concerns.
“The content of the program included messages about standing up for oneself and others, reporting bullying to trusted adults, encouraging students to set goals and to include peers who may be left out,” Blais said.
The issue concerned the group’s frontman, James Linehan, who is also a musician with the stage name J-Line. In his music career, Linehan bills himself as “your favorite gay pop star” and is currently on a tour called the “Dirty Pop Party,” where he performs alongside other LGBTQ artists.
Libs of TikTok, run by Chaya Raichik, a former Brooklyn real estate agent turned social media provocateur, pulled photos from Linehan’s music website, in which he is shirtless, and targeted his sexuality to argue that he was pushing sexually charged content on children.
The Icon Dance Team, which also goes by the names Echo Dance Team and Vital Dance Team, is a separate entity. The group, active since at least 2011, features Linehan and two backup dancers and has performed at more than 2,000 schools, according to its website.
Performances consist of 30 minutes of choreographed dancing and singing to songs about self-acceptance, followed by Linehan recounting how he was bullied in grade school and his journey to finding his life passions and respecting himself.
School officials reviewed the group’s website before scheduling the performance and found it aligned with the district’s anti-bullying goals, Blais said.
“The group was chosen based on strong recommendations from several other school districts where similar performances had been presented in the past,” Blais said. “Those districts described the assemblies as positive and energetic and praised their messages about self-esteem and anti-bullying.”
Hours of the group’s school performances posted by other districts online and reviewed by the Bangor Daily News do not include suggestive dancing and Linehan does not mention his sexuality.
This is not the first time the dance team has faced criticism, nor the first time Libs of TikTok has taken aim at Maine.
In the past year, the account amplified a school board debate over the harassment of transgender students in North Berwick and the election of a Bangor city councilor with a criminal record. The account was among the right-wing influencers that successfully campaigned to doom a 2024 bill before the Maine legislature that surrounded gender-affirming care.
Icon’s performances at schools in Utah, Ohio, Texas and Tennessee have come under scrutiny from parents who referred to Linehan’s music career and posts on his social media accounts.
A district in Missouri canceled two assemblies in 2023 after receiving complaints. Some of the criticism is linked to allegations that Linehan encouraged students at some performances to follow his Instagram, which is tied to his music career. Parents alleged it contained “inappropriate” content.
That Instagram page is now private. Blais said they raised the issue with the group ahead of the performance.
“That was not a part of the performance in any way and we clarified this with the company prior to their visit to our school,” she said.
Linehan did not respond to a request for comment.
Libs of TikTok has almost 7 million followers between X, Facebook, Instagram and Truth Social, the platform founded by President Donald Trump.
Raichik, the account’s creator, has mingled with Trump and other right-wing politicians and activists at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida residence. Her posts, which can receive hundreds of thousands to millions of views, have helped shape anti-LGBTQ discourse in conservative circles and have been promoted by the likes of podcaster Joe Rogan and Fox News.
The Southern Poverty Law Center labels Raichik as an extremist.
But despite the assembly generating national outrage last week, in Fort Fairfield, the community appears unshaken.
“We’ve not received a single call or email from local community members that I am aware of,” Blais said. “We initially received a handful of calls from individuals who were clearly not affiliated with the school district in any way, but they were not interested in hearing what actually took place.”
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