Dell Emerson sat watching a conveyor belt run at Wescogus Wild Blueberry on Thursday. A pair of local teenagers picked out green and overripe blueberries as the harvest was winnowed and packed into cardboard boxes, which Emerson then sold to visitors in between answering phone calls at the shop attached to his Addison home trimmed in blueberry-colored paint.
Signs outside advertised that the farm was still hiring as the harvest continued, looking for rakers and line workers. “Meet your farmer,” another sign inside read.
All around him was evidence of a lifetime growing not just blueberries, but the state’s wild blueberry industry.
Emerson, 91, designed and built the equipment used here and by other small growers, including the winnowing line. He spent 53 years working nearby at the University of Maine’s wild blueberry research station, 30 as its manager, during a period that roughly nearly quadrupled yields of Washington County’s iconic crop. With his wife, Marie, he built Wild Blueberry Land, a blueberry-colored geodesic dome with a shop and museum just up the road on Route 1 in Columbia Falls that’s become a popular attraction for travelers since it opened in 2001.
The couple have long been advocates for the survival of small family farms and blueberrying traditions during a period of consolidation of land ownership and processing operations in the industry, sometimes facing pushback for doing so.
“His goal was to save small farms, and he’s done it in many, many ways,” Marie Emerson said.
But Dell Emerson doesn’t consider anything that has to do with farming “work,” he said. Growing up one of 10 siblings on a farm in Columbia Falls, each time of year came with its own tasks.
“There’s a job that goes in each season, and you know that, and you do it. It’s part of the season,” he said. “I didn’t mind working. It was just part of living.”
In 1953, at age 18, he started as an assistant at Blueberry Hill, the University of Maine’s blueberry experimental research station in Jonesboro. Helped by curiosity and work ethic, he worked his way up to manager in 1976 and stayed in the role until 2006.
Since Emerson took the helm, developments in weed control, pollination and fertilization in particular that were researched at the university station have significantly increased yields.
The herbicide Velpar “changed everything” and made it possible to fertilize without also feeding weeds, Emerson said. The now-common practice of renting honeybees each spring to improve pollination also bumped up yields significantly.
Irrigation also appeared on the scene and is becoming common for large growers; not so much yet for smaller farmers like the Emersons, who tend 40 acres of blueberry land. Many growers have also shifted from harvesting primarily with workers using hand rakes to mechanized harvesters.
In the late 1970s, Emerson and his son Zane started the Maine Wild Blueberry Equipment Company, designing and building harvesting and processing equipment for small farms that are still in use across the state. Their innovations included the walk-behind mechanical harvester and smaller-scale winnowing equipment like the kind in his shop.
Emerson also helped breed new berries, even climbing Katahdin in the 1970s to bring cold-hardy sod down from the mountain that was used in the development of Patriot highbush blueberries.
Known as cultivated blueberries rather than wild, such bushes produce annually instead of on the two-year cycle of wild plants. But Emerson realized that such breeding programs would outcompete Maine growers – and they do, he said.
Market competition from cultivated blueberries is just one challenge facing Maine’s industry, which also has been squeezed by rising costs of production, fuel, labor, and honeybees on top of climate challenges. About 20% of the state’s blueberry land has gone out of production in the last five years, according to the Maine Wild Blueberry Commission industry group.
Marie Emerson views wild blueberry fields as very biodiverse, “wonderful” ecosystems that would be lost in an agricultural shift to only cultivated species.
“To find something this wild and this natural is a rare thing today, because nature gets it right, especially after almost 12,000 years,” she said.
From the Emersons’ perspective, consolidation in the industry has harmed small growers and reduced the options they have to sell berries for a fair price. When Dell Emerson was a boy, there were three blueberry canneries in Columbia Falls alone, and jobs were easy to find, he said.
Three processors now buy most of the berries in Washington County, where the majority of the country’s domestic wild blueberry crop is harvested.
In the early 2000s, three major companies – Wyman’s, Cherryfield Foods and Allen’s Blueberry Freezer, the latter of which is now owned by Wyman’s – were found guilty of price fixing in a class-action lawsuit that found they cost growers more than $18 million over four years in the late 1990s.
As Emerson approached retirement from Blueberry Hill in 2005, he told the Bangor Daily News he would miss the work but not industry politics. Two years before, the three processors had called unsuccessfully for him to be fired for suggesting layoffs by Cherryfield Foods after the case were more for publicity than financial need.
Those years of underpayment led the Emersons to lose about a third of their own acreage, Marie Emerson said. Other good blueberry land elsewhere in Maine has since gone to processors, become reforested, or been developed, she said.
Milbridge-based Wyman’s is currently selling off hundreds of acres of land in the midcoast and Hancock County that the company acquired when it bought Allen’s Blueberry Freezer five years ago.
Emerson also helped start a wild blueberry growers cooperative that sells fresh berries in the 1980s.
In 2001, the couple opened Wild Blueberry Land, more recently known as the Wild Blueberry Heritage Center. Inside the distinctive building, blueberry products are for sale and visitors can learn about the fruit and its history. Born out of an idea for a fruit stand, it has grown into a regional tourist attraction.
On display there is a wall of old wooden blueberry boxes bearing the names of numerous now-defunct local processors where growers could once sell their berries. The boxes sat behind Emerson’s desk at the UMaine research station.
“Saving our family farms,” a placard propped against it is titled, noting that the state lost 92 family blueberry farmers between 2007 and 2021 to a total of 485 as the price per pound of berries dropped.
Emerson’s own family farm hummed along Thursday. In the early afternoon, Marie drove teenage employees back to the field to rake after a break from the heat, and the line started up again.
Last year was the worst harvest he had ever seen, but now, Emerson said, things are looking good.
