By RICHARD SITLER
Indiana Correspondent

CHATSWORTH, N.J. — According to a report in the Burlington County Times, New Jersey’s cranberry farmers are expecting a bumper crop thanks to a cool, wet summer. The USDA expects the Garden State to produce 54 million pounds of cranberries this year. That is a 5 percent increase on 2008.

Bill Haines of Pine Island Cranberry Co. in Chatsworth said that his harvest is running ahead of the best number’s he has ever seen.
Burlington the Beautiful, A County of Opportunities is a visitors’ guide to the area, and it reports the cranberry crop is vital historically, agriculturally, economically, environmentally and culturally to the New Jersey Pine Barrens region.

This report said the bogs in Burlington County, N.J. grow more than 90 percent of the nearly 60 million pounds of cranberries grown annually on 3,700-plus acres in New Jersey, the country’s third-largest cranberry producing state. Wisconsin and Massachusetts are the top two.

Ocean Spray Cranberry Cooperative has a major presence in Burlington County. The co-op started as Cranberry Canners, and adopted the Ocean Spray name in 1959. Ocean Spray is made up of more than 800 local, national and Canadian cranberry growers.
According to Burlington the Beautiful, A County of Opportunities the Ocean Spray Bordentown, N.J. facility has 260 employees who work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week during harvest time to turn New Jersey’s harvest of a half million barrels of cranberries into Ocean Spray fruit juice and other products.

Cranberry facts
From a brochure produced by the American Cranberry Growers Assoc.:

•Cranberries do not grow in the water. Cranberries grow on low-lying vines in sandy bogs, which are flooded for wet-harvesting in the fall, then re-flooded for the duration of the winter to protect from cold weather damage.

•Cranberries are one of the three major fruits native to North America.

•Cranberry vines are perennial.

•Some producing cranberry bogs are well over 100 years old.

•Small air-filled chambers inside a cranberry cause the fruit to bounce, and also to float.

•A cranberry farmer can lose up to the 75 percent of a crop if the blossoms are not properly pollinated.

•Wild cranberries can be found along river banks and low-lying areas throughout the New Jersey Pinelands and along the shore.

•Ninety-five percent of New Jersey’s cranberries are sold to Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., a grower-owned cooperative with a receiving station in Chatsworth and a processing plant located in Bordentown, N.J.