Sitting in a windowed nook in his second-floor office, Bill Haines is seeing red.
That’s not to say Haines is in a rage: Dressed in jeans and a pullover sweater, the 60-year-old Jersey native is calm and laconic. The red he’s seeing is quite literal, as he looks out onto a flooded bog where cranberries mass atop the water in a crimson blanket.
Haines is a fourth-generation cranberry farmer whose Pine Island Cranberry Co. is in New Jersey’s rural Pine Barrens, 90 miles south of NYC.
If you start your day with a glass of cranberry juice or end it with a Cosmopolitan, odds are good you’ve consumed the fruit of the Pine Barrens, where cranberries — which once grew wild in the sandy soil — have been farmed since the mid-19th century. Today, several dozen local growers, many of them multi-generational family businesses like Haines’, make New Jersey the third-largest cranberry producing state.
Which means October, when crops are harvested, is a busy time in these parts — and a welcome one. Saturday, the bounty will be celebrated at the annual cranberry festival in Chatsworth, NJ, a tiny burg north of Haines’ farm.
“Dad used to say harvest time was like Christmas, and that is how it feels,” says Haines, who will reap some 30 million pounds during a five-week harvest. “You get to measure your progress by watching it get loaded up on a truck.”
This happens via a process called wet harvesting, pioneered by Haines’ father, Bill Sr., in the early 1960s. Previously, cranberries — which grow on vines, not underwater as is sometimes believed — were picked like any other berry. Full of air pockets, though, cranberries are buoyant, so the idea behind wet harvesting is to flood bogs so they float to the top, then skim them off the surface — a much quicker process.
It’s one of many ways the business has changed since Haines’ greatgrandfather, Martin, began harvesting wild cranberries in 1860. Haines’ grandfather and father followed in the business, and Bill Jr.’s father passed him the reins in 1988. He hopes to do the same with his son Michael, the youngest of his six children, who recently graduated from Fordham with a classics degree. “He’s going to come in and see how he likes it,” says Haines.
The efficiency of wet harvesting becomes clear as a pair of teams tackle the bogs adjacent to Pine Island’s headquarters, a two-story Victorian house. Flooded the previous evening, the bogs sit under a couple of feet of water. First come a half-dozen workers in chest waders pushing “beaters,” machines with spinning cylinders. As the beaters knock the berries off the vines, they gather on the water’s surface in a deep-red slick.
Next comes the second team, which encircles the bog in a floating yellow “cranboom.” As a worker blasts berries off of the bog’s edge with a blower, the boom is tightened, sweeping the bobbing fruit toward a collecting station where, guided by workers with wooden paddles, it’s sucked onto a conveyor and loaded into a truck.
After leaves and sticks are blown out, the berries will be trucked to an Ocean Spray station up the road. (Nearly all local berries go to Ocean Spray, a grower’s cooperative.) The berries from Haines’ 1,300 acres of bogs will all be processed into juice and other products — berries sold fresh require dry picking, which is less damaging.
Haines must battle plant disease, errant weather and murderous frosts. He also experiments with new varieties — these bogs grow Crimson Queen, developed at Rutgers University.
Newer varieties offer better yield, color and disease resistance, says Haines, pulling some berries from the bog’s edge. “Color is important — we get paid more for better color.”
Demand has grown in recent decades, and continues due in part to newer products like the sweetened, dried craisin, “the fastest growing part of the product line.”
Haines eats them himself, on his breakfast cereal, and is a regular drinker of cranberry juice. And he loves raw berries as well, he says, popping one into his mouth as beaters whine nearby.
“It’s my business,” he says, “but I actually do like them.”
Info: The 30th annual Chatsworth Cranberry Festival runs Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., in Chatsworth, NJ. The free fest features arts-and-crafts vendors, live music, a classic car show, a quilt display — and, of course, cranberry jams, vinegars, baked goods, ice cream and other edibles. Info: cranfest.org.