The price is right?
12/6/08 | 11 comments

The price is right?


Wild blueberry growers feel the hit when, after years of increases, per-unit value falls 40%
By Sharon Kiley Mack
BDN Staff
BANGOR DAILY NEWS FILE PHOTO
Blueberry rakers work in a field in Centerville Township in August 2006. Buy Photo

The price paid for wild blueberries this year has dropped about 40 percent, according to some growers, and blueberry experts are blaming a bumper crop and a poor economy.

The drop hit growers such as Mike Bailey of Columbia Falls right in the pocketbook.

“I am a small grower with 150 acres,” Bailey said this week. “I do all of the work myself. I had a good yield. I expected the price to go down a bit this year but not this far.”

Last year, Bailey received $1.16 a pound for his fresh wild blueberries, which are sold to a cooperative. This year he got 64 cents.

“It hurts,” he said.

“It’s sort of the perfect storm,” said David Bell of the Wild Blueberry Association of Maine. “Both Maine and Canada had healthy crops this year.”

This year’s crop is estimated to be 90 million pounds, compared with an average of 75 million pounds. Final harvest and price figures will not be available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture until mid-January.

But Bell said the price, which had been rising by leaps and bounds over the past eight years, was too high for the market to sustain in a poor economy.

Last year, the value of Maine’s wild blueberry crop was $83 million, an increase of 38 percent from the 2006 value, due to increases in both price and production.

But this year, growers are reporting that their berries got 60 to 62 cents a pound, compared with $1.07 a pound last year, according to Bell.

In recent months, Bell said, the supply of wild berries increased while the demand decreased.

“The cultivated berry industry didn’t sell all their freezer inventory,” he said. “They then began lowering their price. They are who we are competing with, and that started pulling our price down.”

Bell said that in 2002, berries went for 28 cents a pound. The price rose to 45 cents in 2004, 80 cents in 2006 and more than a dollar a pound last year.

“You have to remember, prices last year were up 40 percent,” David Yarborough, a blueberry specialist at the University of Maine, said this week.

Yarborough said the historic wild berry price is 60 cents a pound. “That’s a very good price, but of course for the growers, all their costs have been going up,” he said.

Buoyed by scientific studies and consumer interest in the cancer-fighting benefits of blueberries, the cultivated-berry industry began planting more bushes. Yarborough said the cultivated crop this year was 413 million pounds when it usually is around 350 million.

“Over the next five or six years there will continue to be a huge increase in their crop,” Bell predicted. “If a large percentage of that crop ends up as freezer berries, they will be competing directly with us.”

Yarborough said another issue is that when prices get high, brokers begin looking for alternatives. “There’s a point when the price is too high, demand drops. Look at this year’s gas situation.”

Nat Lindquist at Jasper Wyman and Sons blueberry processors in Milbridge called the price drop “a market correction.”

Bell said the wild berry industry recognized the increased competition from the cultivated industry and has been concentrating on advertising the wild product as well as seeking more foreign markets.

“If a culture consumes a lot of yogurt, we try to get wild blueberries in that yogurt. In many large cities [in Asia], Western-style bakeries are becoming quite popular, so we market wild blueberries for the Western-style pastries,” he said.

Maine has been marketing blueberries worldwide for 25 years, Bell said. “We have a great success story in Japan, where jams are quite popular.”

Bell said this year has been filled with “good news and bad news. We are extremely concerned about the price. But this is the natural flex of the market when the price goes too high. We are coming off a couple of good years. We always try to get a premium price in the marketplace, but that works against us in a poor economy.”

Bell said there have been a series of industry meetings over the past several weeks. “We are doing the best we can to adjust our promotional programs to really push the wild product,” he said. “The big dynamic here is that the cultivated folks have felt the benefit of our berry’s health story and we need to capitalize on that.”

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Comments
11 comments on this item
On 12/6/08 at 9:54 AM, pcme2000 wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

I feel so sorry for Mike Bailey and the other owners. Ya right. And you bring in the outof staters to pick your crops get them on foodstamps and etc while you work them to death for almost nothing in pay and make a killing.

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On 12/6/08 at 10:05 AM, JWBooth wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

Maybe if the welfare system weren't so generous, you'd see more locals in the fields -- just like the old days.

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On 12/6/08 at 1:49 PM, worker wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

pcme2000 if it wern't for the migrant workers the crop wouldn't get harvested. There just arn't that many locals that will do this work anymore. Mike as well as a lot of other growers are having there ground leveled so that we can machine pick. I think it is very odd that the price dropped so much the same year that the end of the law suit did. Rainbow farms came in here and was willing to pay for the crop but the 2 other company's will take all the money out of the little growers pocket they can. The big company's have made there money on the backs of the little guy. I think for the money we pay in blueberry tax We don't get much for our money. The price this year is just a get even with them job by the big company's and Baldy and crew help them.

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On 12/6/08 at 11:19 PM, Knightscross wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

The growers made a ton of money. They hired Illegal Aliens and paid them crap. The growers pocketed huge profits by hiring Illegal Aliens to work for them. So stop the crying already about the low price for berries. You don't hear the Illegals crying do you? Ice should be doing some investigating into Illegal hiring and start deportations in Washington County.

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On 12/7/08 at 3:05 PM, kylie00 wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

between picking berries and then making wreath @ the local wreath factory these undocumented workers ( illegal immigrants ) are making a nice sum to send back to the family down south of the border. You can pay the workers a lot less then locals. The locals would work but can you afford to take you life into your own hands working with these ILLEGALS. It happenat a wreath factory and again at a store. A knife was pulled by one of the illegals on a local Citizen ( American ). The only reason we know he was illegal is he was deported when caught.

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On 12/7/08 at 3:55 PM, worker wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

Kylie00 well you got about 8 weeks of the year covered for them what do they do the rest of the year.

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On 12/7/08 at 5:41 PM, Louise wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

kylie00----- I bet you were right there when both of these incidents happened with the knife, so you Know for a fact that this is true!! You know i've been wondering, when did all us from the U.S.A. decide that we are so damn much better then the rest of the world?Is this written down somewhere? I don't know how much of a good wage they make to send home to their families, but they are doing the jobs because most of the locals won't do it. Not just there, but anywhere. As you've all been saying for months on here, it's much easier to get welfare. Maybe some of the "boys" need to toughen up , take their lives into their hands, and go to work and replace these fella's! This should start some comments!!

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On 12/9/08 at 11:45 AM, reaganite wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

Whatever, Louise. NO ILLEGALS IN MAINE, by God. MY wife is a LEGAL alien and she feels the same. I'm a social worker, and I've had it up to here with the bleeding heart liberal crap that HURTS good Americans (as well as most of the ILLEGALS too..............but then again, I have to remember that "it's all the GOOD people who want illegal immigration and it's the BAD people who don't want it...." right????)

Oh yeah, and I've actually DONE the field work that illegals are now doing most of. I put my money where my mouth is. Louise, have YOU ever done blueberrries or broccoli?? Or lost a job to an illegal??

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On 12/9/08 at 12:02 PM, Louise wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

Well, I'll tell you, young man, I've raked blueberries, picked beans , dug potato's by hand and worked on the harvesters.Also worked inside the cold ass potato houses in the winter. So reaganite, will this qualify me? I did these things to raise my children and feed them. As they got older I got my education and went into the health field. Not saying I'm a GOOD person, probably not. What I did say was, this work needs to be done. How many do you know that will sign up to do this? Also, I've worked with many social workers, so that dosen't scare me. You appear to have a problem. Sorry if that's so. And my money IS where my mouth is ,son. Been there, done that.

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On 12/9/08 at 12:34 PM, leatherglove wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

There are a lot of jobs all over the country that apparently Americans have become "too good" for. There are also alot of people on welfare that are perfectly capable of working. So, how about we ship the illegal immigrants home and get all those people on welfare (that are able to work) out there in the fields? When did good, old-fashioned hard work become more embarassing than living on welfare, anyway?

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On 12/9/08 at 2:06 PM, David889327 wrote:         Repeated separate thumbs down will cause comment to be hidden

A letter to People From Away:

Hey! I live in Maine, nd Tha povity is so that the powa fogot wat bein powa is. Thaya is all kinda industry hea . Yah got the job a unloadin the stuff outa the summa camps when the flatlandas all go home fu tha winta, nd thays nut checks that go out betwwn tha fist an tha therd. nd as fa as I kin see the edjewkashon is ok too. I was jist little wen I leand ta roll a fattie in skool. Then thes the art a runnin ova tha deea with the truk. Is Legel to keep as many as ya kin run ova, the trick is giten em tyed down fist. Fiddleheaden, shrimp peelin, bluebrees ta rake, tippin, wood cuttin, the list goes on an on. But if ya got some standad a livin thayt is diffrent, nd yah git hea an deside yoo gonna change it, than ya run inta problems. As fa as waqes gos I no lots peple tha liv on les ten $500 bucks a month. Wonda how? come on and find out!

DOAN FORGET FEEDING TURIST DOUBLE DIPT CLAMS CRAM CHOWDER THICK AS CEMENT AN XPLAIN Y THEM HOT DAWGS ARE SO DANG RED AYUH N WORKIN IN BAH HARBOR FOR 5.5 MONTHS JUST LONG ENOUGH TO NOT GET UNENJOYMENT

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