Climate change creating new challenges for cranberry producers

The cranberry harvest is the moment Larry Nason works toward the whole year.

"It's exciting to see the last berry go onto the truck," he said. "It's a good feeling."

But, this year's weatherpresented new challenges for the farm, as cranberry producers across New Brunswick were forced to adapt to severe drought and hot temperatures.

It's an obstacle experts expect to intensify in the coming years.

At Springbrook Cranberry in Tracy, the hot temperatures and lack of rain required more irrigation work, resulting in higher expenses.

While cranberries can thrive in warm weather and dry soil, water is necessary for harvesting and protecting from extreme heat. For organic operations like Springbrook, it's also used for repelling insects.

The berries grow on a vine and water is used several times a year to flood them.

Nason, 67, said the reservoirs next to his 13 acres of fields dipped to record low levels.

"We built what we thought was a bounty of water-holding capacity, but they're the lowest I've ever seen them," he said. "I'm hoping we get some snow this winter to fill them back up."

Hotter temperatures expected

The drought this summer ranged from severe to moderate levels across New Brunswick.

Loc D'Orangeville, an assistant professor in the faculty of forestry and environmentalmanagement at UNB Fredericton, said droughts of that severity have only occurred about four times per century.

But D'Orangeville said extreme weather events are expected to increase with climate change.

"For the whole Acadian region, we expect two to seven degrees warming by the end of the century and marginal changes in precipitation," he said. "If you combine those you can expect more frequent and severe droughts."

Those warmer temperatures will likely result in an earlier snow melt expanding the growing season. But that would leave less water for the late summer months, resulting in increasingly drier soils.

"It's a shift in the seasonality of things, and farmers are probably going to need to adapt to these new realities," D'Orangeville said.

WATCH |Cranberry growers adapt to a summer of drought

Cranberry growers adapt to a summer of drought

4 years ago

Duration 3:04

The harvest went smoothly at Springbrook Cranberry in Tracy this year. But there's concern around the future impact of climate change.

Extreme weather concerns

New Brunswick is home to about 24 cranberry operations and is the third largest Canadian producer, after Quebec and British Columbia.

Springbrook Cranberry is a small, family-run operation a scale that's rare in the province.

Farm manager Rebekah Nason is the second generation of her family to run the farm, after her parents started it in the late 1990s. She's also the president of Canneberges NB Cranberries, the industry association.

Rebekah and her father Larry are in the fields throughout the year. It's a constant effort to adapt to the challenges brought by the elements, which range from frost protection to fighting off insects by flooding the fields.

The drought made protecting the berries especially difficult. More irrigation work raised expenses.

That's a concern as growers recover from big price fluctuations over the past decade.

"We need to always be encouraging consumers to eat cranberries to keep the price up at a level where we can afford to grow them," Rebekah Nason said.

Beyond drought, she said producers are also worried about damage to infrastructure and extreme flooding as another effect of climate change.

"The extreme weather is really the concern, like the big storms."

Creative harvesting

On a crisp October day, about a dozen friends, family and local kids suited up and waded into the ponds in Tracy for the final day of harvest.

The berries ripen and become ready to be taken off the vines around Thanksgiving

Some are harvested dry for the produce shelves of grocery stores and stored in coolers.

After enough berries are collected dry, the fields are flooded again. A machine called a beater is pushed through the field to break the stems off the berries, so they float freely at the surface.

The cranberries are then gathered together with "booms" and manually dragged to the edgeof the pond, where they are loaded into a transport truck through a tube.

Elizabeth Nason, Rebekah's sister, said Springbrook's tiny operation relies on homeschooled kids in the area whose parents allow them to take a day off.

Friends and family provide the extra labour needed to get the berries out of the water on the truck.

"I think the kids really enjoy the day out, and they get to see biology at work basically with the growth of cranberries and how it works to get them off the field," she said.

The berries at Springbrook go to a processing plant in Quebec to be dried and turned into juices and food products. They can also be found at the Fredericton Boyce Farmers Market and grocery stores around the Maritimes.

Rebekah Nason said while her farm did have enough water to have a wet harvest, other growers weren't as fortunate.

Producers were forced to be creative this year and find new ways to harvest with a limited water supply, such as offering a U-pick open to the public. That allowed the berries to be harvested without flooding the fields.

She said New Brunswick growers actually would benefit from a little more warmth since the plants can do well in dry weather. But fuel usage and irrigation makes operating more expensive.

"I think it's definitely going to be a challenge with climate change in the future even if there's some benefits," she said.

The hope is that improved yields will be able to keep pace with rising costs.

'We're going to change with the times'

Larry Nason started the farm with his wife after attending a horticulture conference in the 1990s. He heard the industry was looking for more growers and decided to start an operation on his land in Tracy.

Springbrook launched shortly after the commercial planting of cranberries began in New Brunswick in 1994.

His daughter Rebekah has now taken over running the farm.

"It seems to be even more rare to have children come home and want to work the farm. There's a few, but we've lost a lot of our younger generation," said Larry Nason.

"I'll stay as long as I can climb up on a tractor and as long as they'll have me around. I love doing it."

The operation's second-generation has taken a more scientific approach to growing by adding sensors and looking for new advancements.

That approach could fare well as the growing season shifts and weather becomes even more unpredictable with climate change.

"It just keeps you on your toes," Larry Nason said.

"We're going to change with the times as we need to change."