Thousands of cranberries drop down bounce boards kind of like a fruit sorter version of a Plinko game, as John Stauner describes it.
“The Bailey mill works on the principle that a good berry bounces and a bad berry doesn't,” said Stauner, owner of James Lake Farms, an organic cranberry farm in Three Lakes.
Stauner explains the good berries continue down the assembly line where they’ll be check by machine and human eyes for coloring and any defects. They’ll go on to be packaged as fresh fruit.
The so called “bad berries” are set aside for ingredient sales as freezer fruits.
Stauner says cranberries on his farm get shipped all over the country, with a lot of the fruit ending up in California. The frozen ones even go international.
“I like the diversity of it. I like the challenge of being organic and adapting the organic practices to growing cranberries. It's a profession where you have a lot of variability throughout the year,” he said.
While Stauner is overseeing the packaging at the warehouse south of Three Lakes, his son Ben is at their other operation on Thunder Lake Marsh west of town.
That’s where they’ve started this year’s harvest, flooding the fields and raking in the cranberries with heavy machinery.
Stauner says the crops are looking promising this year with yields up so far.
“We were concerned about water coming into the spring, and then the rains came, and that filled everything up which was desperately needed. The rain didn't really impact the early development,” said Stauner. “We had a very good bloom around the Fourth of July, some nice, warm temperatures, and we avoided the hail up here in northern Wisconsin.”
Lake Nokomis Cranberries in Eagle River has marshes that border those at Thunder Lake Marsh.
Manager Bob Canada says their harvest is also up this year, about double their usual yield.
“You hope that it's something that you did right, but Mother Nature plays the ultimate role in everything,” said Canada.
The above average yields weren’t projected earlier this season.
In August, USDA numbers expected harvest to be down a bit this year because of hail damage and our unusual winter.
There are still some farms that will be down because of the hailstorms, but Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association Executive Director Grant Holley says it looks like the heat wave in late September gave crops the boost they needed.
“That was fairly unprecedented, that we had high 80s here in central Wisconsin. Folks were a little nervous what they were going to do to the cranberries, but what they wound up doing was they took a lot of the water that we had and pushed it directly into the berry,” said Holley.
What was originally projected to be about a 4.9-million-barrel crop is now looking to be north of five million barrels.
“I hesitate to go any higher than that, simply because I don't want fate to hear me, but I think it's going to be a good year for Wisconsin,” said Holley.
Much of the Northwoods is now in moderate to severe drought. It’s not currently impacting harvest, but it is something Holley says they’re keeping a close eye on.
Growers flood the fields over the winter so the ice can protect crops.
“Water is the lifeblood of the cranberry. We don't really use it. We just sort of borrow it, because it's just making those water levels to be able to help protect the bushes,” said Holley. “That is something we're paying attention to. It's not detrimental yet, but it is going to be something we have to watch in the wintertime.”
James Lake Farms and other growers won’t know for certain how good the cranberry crop is this year until harvest wraps up at the end of the month.
Until then, it’s all hands-on deck.
“It's go time for us. We'll have six, eight weeks here of pretty intense times. But you know, there are times when you can relax a little bit and recoup,” said Stauner.
Lake Nokomis Cranberries and James Lake Farms both offer marsh tours for people that want to see the harvest in person.
Wisconsin growers produce more than half of the cranberries grown in the U.S.
Roughly five percent of this year’s crop will be sold as fresh fruit.
The remaining cranberries will be frozen and stored for longer-term sales as frozen berries, dried cranberries, juices, sauces and more.
