The New Brunswick government is opening up 4,000 acres of new public land for wild blueberry farming, even as the supply of the fruit has been bursting in Maine and Canada.
The expansion will “contribute to making New Brunswick the largest producer of wild blueberries in the world,” Rick Doucet, New Brunswick’s minister of agriculture, aquaculture and fisheries, said in a news release.
A surge in wild blueberry production across North America recently left Maine wild blueberry growers, currently the largest producers in the world, with a 30 million pound surplus. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently agreed purchase at least part of that surplus with $13 million under a Great Depression-era program that will pass along the berries to places such as food banks, schools and prisons.
Despite a bumper crop in Canada as well, New Brunswick’s government sees a growing global market for the antioxidant rich berries, Doucet said. “Wild blueberry production has enormous potential for fueling economic growth in our province, particularly when you consider that the value of production at the farm gate has more than tripled over the last decade,” he said.
The New Brunswick government is leasing land in Gloucester and Northumberland counties, in the northeastern region of the province. Thirty-seven applications from farmers were accepted, with their leases ranging between about 24 and 57 acres, the government told CBC News.
After more than a decade of investments in new production, New Brunswick’s wild blueberry harvest accounts for 25 percent of Canada’s overall production of the fruit, about 80 percent of which is exported, including some to the U.S. But with bumper harvests in Maine, more production in Canada and also more supply of highbush blueberries, prices have fallen.
The weak Canadian dollar has offered Canadian farmers who export the crop something of a buffer amid the large supply, John Handrahan, president of the Prince Edward Island wild blueberry growers association, told CBC’s Island Morning.
Most of New Brunswick’s wild blueberry industry comprises small- and medium-size farms, along with fresh and frozen processors, according to the provincial agriculture department. In its long-term planning, the New Brunswick government has called for focusing on value-added processing of wild blueberries for export, as well as promoting agri-tourism and local sales.
Growing harvests in Canada may raise some supply concerns for Maine growers, but the industries on both sides of the border have been collaborating on global marketing via the Wild Blueberry Association of North America, according to Nancy McBrady, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine
If the New Brunswick government aids in promotion and ultimately helps grow the overall market, “I think it will be benefiting Maine as well,” McBrady said of the leasing expansion across the border.