Massachusetts’ Cranberry Harvest Is in Peril Due to Northeast Drought

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Peter Hanlon, a 68-year-old farmer from Boston, has been rising cranberries in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for many years. Cranberries are in Hanlon’s blood — his grandfather farmed them on the cape earlier than him. However six weeks in the past, Hanlon bought his farm within the city of Sandwich. None of his children wished to hold on the custom, and Hanlon doesn’t blame them: Revenue margins are extremely tight, and more and more erratic climate patterns lately have made cranberries harder to develop.

“The final two storms, in ‘15 and ‘17, scared me,” Hanlon mentioned. He remembers seeing an 11-foot surge of ocean water coming into his farm by way of the woods and inundating his vines, dooming lots of them to die from salt publicity.

Cranberry farmers in Massachusetts have needed to deal with wildly fluctuating environmental circumstances over the previous a number of years. The 2015 and 2017 storms Hanlon referred to killed some coastal Massachusetts cranberry bogs once they flooded them with sea water, excessive temperatures and drought parched vines in 2020, and a deluge of rainfall pickled the state’s cranberry crop final yr, resulting in a nationwide scarcity. Massachusetts is the second-largest producer of cranberries within the nation behind Wisconsin, which additionally had a nasty rising season final yr.

This yr, one other huge drought, fueled by local weather change, has farmers like Hanlon weighing their choices and making powerful choices.

Massachusetts and far of the remainder of the Northeastern United States has been in a state of average to excessive drought for the higher a part of the summer season. Dry circumstances descended on the area in late spring and didn’t let up for months. Massachusetts handled a number of the worst drought within the Northeast: As of the top of final month, 10 of its 14 counties had been experiencing excessive drought, and the remaining 4 had been experiencing extreme drought. “The increase or bust state of affairs that local weather change presents with regards to precipitation occasions — the increase being the big precipitation occasion, the bust being lengthy dry spells — that’s not factor,” Zachary Zobel, a scientist on the Woodwell Local weather Analysis Heart in Massachusetts, instructed Grist.

The Massachusetts drought has begun to ease in current weeks, particularly after this previous week, when a spherical of soaking storms rolled into the Northeast. However it could take one other spherical or two of moist climate to make up for the months of drought that desiccated farm fields, depleted reservoirs, and sparked wildfires within the Northeast. And this yr’s drought is extra proof that farming circumstances are getting much less predictable.

“Farmers get up day by day they usually must face regardless of the climate goes to current to them — that’s farming,” Brian Wick, government director of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Affiliation, instructed Grist. “Nevertheless it’s fairly clear in speaking to many growers over the previous a number of years that this modification in local weather could be very actual and it’s actually beginning to influence how they farm.”

Cranberries are a finicky crop. An excessive amount of water, just like the state noticed final yr, may cause fungus to develop on cranberry vines and have an effect on the colour and high quality of the fruit. However add too little water, and the vines shrivel up and die, or the berries don’t develop to full maturity.

Farmers additionally want entry to ample recent water to be able to defend and harvest their cranberries. Cranberries develop on vines in dry fields very like grapes or another crop throughout many of the rising season. However twice a yr, farmers flood these dry fields with water and switch them into bogs: Within the spring, when a late frost may threaten to kill their budding cranberry vines, the flooding protects the tender shoots and flowers from freezing over. Within the fall, farmers activate their irrigation techniques once more to reap their berries. They use machines to shake the vegetation to launch the berries into the bathroom, the place they’re corralled into containers and shipped to locations throughout the nation.

With out water, there are not any cranberries. And with out cranberries, Massachusetts misses out on an trade that contributes roughly 7,000 jobs to its economic system and greater than $1 billion in annual financial exercise to the area.

Thus far, it appears like most cranberry farmers are going to drag by way of this yr, because of the current storms and to irrigation pumps, which farmers switched on all through the season to drag water from native sources and make up for misplaced rainfall. Nevertheless it was a costlier rising season for that motive — pumps run on gasoline or propane, and gasoline prices had been astronomical this summer season. And the drought isn’t over but. Wick gained’t breathe straightforward till the berries are off the vines and loaded into vehicles. “We’ll see what we get for rainfall over the subsequent few weeks,” he mentioned. “We nonetheless have a couple of month earlier than harvest to get some periodic rains.”

Generally, local weather change isn’t stopping the state’s cranberry farmers from rising their crop — but. “Cranberries in Massachusetts will proceed to thrive,” Wick mentioned, “however it’s going to be more difficult and troublesome, they usually’re going to must adapt. You’re not going to have that good, constant rising season, it simply appears to be one excessive or one other.”

Peter Hanlon, the cranberry farmer who bought his farm, mentioned he’s glad he’s not making an attempt to beat the climate odds this yr or sooner or later. “My son tells me the climate goes to worsen,” he mentioned. However the climate has already been so unhealthy, Hanlon says, it’s arduous to think about an much more erratic season. “I reserve judgment on that,” he mentioned.

This story is a part of the Grist collection Parched, an in-depth have a look at how local weather change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.