Armstrong quoted in BDN article on cranberry harvest
Charles Armstrong, a cranberry specialist with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, spoke with the Bangor Daily News for an article about this year’s cranberry harvest. Armstrong said although this year’s harvest was good, prices were unusually low, making for a “depressing” market. “The price was … horrendous for water-harvested berries,” he said, adding about 84 percent of all cranberries in Maine are wet harvested, which involves flooding the bog and collecting the ripe berries when they float to the surface. Armstrong said the “break-even point” for wet harvesting requires getting about 35 to 40 cents per pound for the berries. This year, however, the price dipped to between 12 and 20 cents a pound, according to the article. Overall, Armstrong estimates Maine’s cranberry farms produced about 2 million pounds of fruit this year, worth an estimated $808,000, which is up from last year’s harvest of 1,542,800 pounds with a value of $437,000, the article states. Mainebiz also reported on the harvest.