Cranberries are the fruit of family’s labor

The New Jersey cranberry farm traces its roots to 1868.

Philadelphia Inquirer

BURLINGTON COUNTY, N.J. — Under a steel-gray sky, workers waded through the swirling mosaic of red, pink and yellow cranberries at a Burlington County bog last month as wide-eyed onlookers snapped photos.

A year’s worth of labor had come down to this moment, when the Lee family and its helpers, filled with excitement and a sense of urgency, began the autumn harvest ritual.

They pushed the berries across the water toward a vacuum that moved the fruit through a hose, then onto a conveyor and into a storage bin, as visitors and a class of college students watched from a gravel road.

“This is the romantic and picturesque part,” said Stephen Lee IV, 41, a Tabernacle, N.J., resident who co-owns the farm. “All the hard work happened before.”

At the Lee Bros. cranberry farm in Washington Township and 34 other sites across New Jersey, the haul is expected to be good this year, thanks to an ideal combination of rain, sun and cooler-than-usual weather. Production in the state is expected to be about 5 percent over 2008.

Nationwide, the U.S. Department of Agriculture anticipates a 10 percent drop in output. The big cranberry-producing states of Wisconsin and Massachusetts were hurt by low temperatures and an excess of precipitation, state agriculture officials said.

The conditions there delayed bees from pollinating the plants, while New Jersey’s weather was akin to what Wisconsin normally receives.

“The harvest looks to be in good shape,” said Richard Nieuwenhuis, president of the 13,000-member New Jersey Farm Bureau, which represents farmers and support industries.

“Everyone loves to see it,” said Nieuwenhuis, who witnessed the harvest last month at Lee Bros.

At the bog, the kaleidoscope of color slowly shrank as the first bin, containing 30,000 pounds of cranberries, was topped off for a short ride to the Ocean Spray processing plant in Chatsworth.

In a celebratory mood, workers in chest-waders tossed berries at one another — and at Lee’s 7-year-old son, Andrew, the seventh generation of the family to work on a farm that traces its roots, and some of its vines, to 1868.

“This is always the most exciting time of the year — to see the fruits of your labor,” said Lee’s father, Stephen Lee III, 63.

The harvest begins with the flooding of a bog.

From a 180-foot well, the Lees pumped tens of thousands of gallons of water into a 10-foot-deep retention pond. The water then was piped into a six-acre cranberry bed.

A hydraulic harvester designed by the family slowly crawled across the bog and, like a giant eggbeater, knocked berries off the vines. As water continued to flow onto the bed, the fruit rose to the surface and workers corralled the berries with a long, floating boom.

“That water is cold. You don’t want to be out there all day,” Stephen Lee III said as he supervised the operation. The Lees have 20 bogs on 135 acres in the county.

Along the edges of the bed, farmhands used rakes and blowers to push the berries away from the banks.

“This is the culmination of everything,” said Ed Begolly, 46, a Lumberton, N.J., resident and sergeant on the township’s police force, who was assisting.

“They work all year long for this ... and you’re just there to help them,” he said. “It’s a privilege and honor.”

Some workers, such as Marc Sano, Burlington County undersheriff and former Lumberton police chief, feel a sense of regional pride in helping the Lees during their two- to three-week harvest.

“I’ve been doing this for about 10 years,” said Sano, 48, of Medford. “I was hunting with friends out here and became friendly with the Lee family.

“Since then I helped put together a group for the harvest. We hop from bog to bog, doing whatever they need us to do.”

Tractors on each side of the bog pulled the boom to a corner, where berries accumulated in the water, 6 inches thick. There, workers began maneuvering the crop with push boards toward a suction box in the middle of a “spray ring.”

“This is part of my heritage,” said Maureen Moore, 35, who joined her cousin Stephen Lee IV in the water.

Demand for the fruit has been spurred by the industry, which has emphasized its health benefits and pushed products such as dried cranberries that keep them on menus and shelves year-round. The dried berries are used in various products, including baked goods, cereals and trail mixes.

When it comes to taste, the berries’ sugar and acid content are the major thing, said Jennifer Johnson-Cicalese, a research associate on cranberry breeding at Rutgers University, who observed the harvest.

After a few minutes’ drive, Lee pulled his truck and trailer bin onto a weigh-in area at Ocean Spray, then dumped the berries into a huge holding pool.

They would be washed and sent to a freezer in Philadelphia or a facility in Massachusetts where they would be made into a juice concentrate or dried for trail mix.

With the first load gone, Lee returned to the bog. There would be 41‚Ñ2 more hours of work — and five trips to Ocean Spray — before he and the rest of the workers would finish harvesting the six-acre site.

“Once this gets in your blood, it never gets out,” Lee said. “There’s something special about farming land that has been in the family for so long, to be part of the family heritage.”