As a major wild blueberry grower continues to sell off land in coastal Maine, where the iconic fruit has long been cultivated, more of the scenic properties in Hancock County are appearing on the market.
While an influx of listings in the midcoast have been met with several community preservation efforts that aim to preserve the vistas they create or the public access they provide, there isn’t a larger coordinated effort to preserve them. In Hancock County — the state’s second-largest producer of wild blueberries behind Washington County — not all blueberry fields are attracting public attention as they are listed for sale.
Blueberries are a key Maine crop and the fields an iconic part of the state’s eastern coastal landscape, but they require intensive management to prevent them from reverting to woodland. It’s also getting harder for growers to make a profit amid rising costs of production and increasingly challenging weather.
Milbridge-based Wyman’s, the state’s largest blueberry company, has recently listed hundreds of acres on the midcoast and in Hancock County that it acquired with the 2021 purchase of Ellsworth-based Allen’s Blueberry Freezer. That purchase also included a freezer facility and cold storage.
In the Hancock County town of Penobscot, the company currently has an active listing for a 90-acre parcel on Leach Road for $679,000. Another 40-acre listing on Route 199 was active last month but has since been removed.
Two other blueberry fields in the town owned by individuals have also sold this year; a 12.5-acre property on North Penobscot Road with 7.5 acres of harvestable blueberry land, and a 208-acre parcel featuring 50 acres of producing blueberry fields on Dunbar Road.
The former Allen’s land mostly included high-producing fields that Wyman’s continues to harvest, according to marketing director Colleen Craig, but some produced low yields or not at all — and Wyman’s planned from the start to sell them, she said.
Craig said many of the acres on the market — all of which were once Allen’s — haven’t been harvested in years. None of Wyman’s properties in the Down East barrens are for sale, according to Craig.
The sales will help fund “strategic investments” like irrigation for fields as weather conditions become increasingly unreliable, she said.
Most of that land is in the midcoast, where some large tracts were recently taken off the market and appeared to be cultivated again this year, the Bangor Daily News previously reported.
Companies and families that own wild blueberry land they harvest to sell to processors have been selling off less profitable fields in Hancock County for decades, according to Bangor Daily News archives.
Some can only be harvested by hand-raking because of rocky or steep terrain, which is more costly than it used to be, and growers have faced tightening margins in recent years along with unpredictable weather damaging crops.
Such scenic properties are also appealing for home developers.
About three years ago, a 38-acre scenic field in Blue Hill, across the peninsula from Penobscot, became the subject of a long, fraught preservation campaign when a Kennebunk-based developer bought it and proposed turning it into nine high-end home lots.
The property on Route 172 overlooked the tidal Salt Pond and had been informally open to community use for decades under its previous owner, whose family sold it after his death.
The town eventually denied the developer’s proposal based on past designations of the property as a scenic site to preserve. The community group that had opposed his plans raised about $1.8 million to purchase the land from him and donate it to the Blue Hill Heritage Trust through an intermediary group.
That transfer was finalized last week.
In neighboring Sedgwick, wild blueberry fields at the base of Caterpillar Hill were subject to another preservation effort in the early 2000s and are now owned by the same land trust, which also preserves former commercial blueberry fields at Wallamatogus Mountain property in Penobscot. The trust didn’t respond to a request for comment.
There doesn’t appear to be similar opposition brewing to the recent listings in Penobscot, where the fields in question are located on side roads or not immediately visible from central roadways.
Amy Brubaker, who helped lead the effort to preserve the Salt Pond barrens in Blue Hill, said she wasn’t aware of any community efforts in Penobscot but emphasized that it’s possible if residents choose to take them on.
“It’s a very special place,” she said of the Salt Pond barrens. “Every blueberry field isn’t that beloved. But the blueberry fields are part of what’s considered a cultural aspect of downeast Maine, so it would be sad to see them all disappear just because it’s no longer profitable.”
Local preservation efforts are underway for other scenic Wyman’s parcels in the midcoast. Separate groups are trying to raise $750,000 to buy 158 acres in Searsport, and are organizing against an RV campground proposed in Northport, which recently passed a campground moratorium that put the proposal on pause.
