LONG BEACH — A cranberry crop ripening in the sun could be Washington’s best in years, but growers are eager for rain to resume before bogs need to be flooded for the harvest.
“It’ll be a major concern by the middle of September,” Long Beach Peninsula cranberry farmer Steve Gray said. “There better be a rain.”
Cranberries illustrate that there’s an upside and downside to the unusually hot and dry weather this summer in Western Washington.
Clouds usually hold yields along Washington’s southwest coast below other cranberry producing states, such as Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Oregon.
Washington’s cranberry bogs in 2014 yielded 975 pounds per acre, while Wisconsin yielded 2,395 pounds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Oregon’s harvest average 1,628 pounds per acre.
Washington State University research scientist Kim Patten, stationed in Long Beach, called recent harvests “embarrassingly low.”
This year, however, Washington cranberries were set up for high yields by an excellent pollination season as bees were active during a warm and dry late spring and early summer, Patten said.
“This will be the best year, theoretically, we’ll have in my lifetime,” he said “If we could get weather like this every year, we wouldn’t give Wisconsin a run for their money, but at least we could make a living.”
The downside, so far, has been the potential for heat damage. At WSU’s cranberry research bogs, an irrigation valve malfunctioned on a hot day, and some vines died, turning a reddish-brown in an otherwise green field.
“You see a lot of heat-stress damage out there (on peninsula bogs). Not every farm, but more than I’d like to see,” Patten said.
A bigger concern is how much rain the region will receive by the time the harvest begins in late September.
Most peninsula cranberry farmers flood their bogs with a foot or two of water and churn the berries to the surface. Water usually isn’t in short supply. The peninsula normally receives more rain in the summer than the Yakima Valley in Central Washington does during the entire year. Rain recharges with groundwater the ponds that most cranberry farmers tap for irrigation and harvests.
This year, however, only a fraction of the usual precipitation has fallen over the past three months. Like almost all of Washington, the peninsula is in a severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Ponds are sinking to late August levels. “The trout are starting to scream at me when I go by,” Gray said.
Without fall rain — and lots of it — some farmers may be strapped to flood more than one bog at a time, For growers with many bogs, the harvest could extend into mid-November, putting more fruit at risk of rotting.
Cranberry grower Malcolm McPhail has water rights to a 35-acre lake for some of his bogs. For his bogs on other parts of the peninsula, “a couple of locations are iffy without rain,” he said. “Several growers are worried about the harvest.”
Patten said coastal drizzle won’t help much. It’s a long-shot the rain deficit can entirely be erased now. “Unless there’s hurricane-level downpours, probably not,” he said.
Gray said he’s looking for the weather to change.
“When you have an extreme weather event, it doesn’t seem like long before you have an extreme event the other way,” he said.
“Overall, I think the plants are enjoying this,” Gray said. “You just have to have the famous water to keep them wet enough.”
