The future of the state's cranberry industry just may lie on a checkerboard in the center of the Cranberry Station bog in Wareham.

It's not a real checkerboard - although that's the name it goes by - but a 3-acre rectangle of evenly divided plots, each 36 by 80 feet, with experimental high-yield vines bearing such names as Crimson Queen, Ben Lear, and Early Blacks.

Each plot is a new variety that, growers hope, holds the key to productive, prosperous, future harvests - enough to keep Massachusetts second only to Wisconsin in cranberry production.

The unveiling of the new varieties comes as the outlook dims for this year's harvest, now underway. During the summer, the US Department of Agriculture projected a 5 percent drop in cranberry production this year. Since then, matters have worsened.

The drop will be as much as an additional 10 percent, predicts George D. Rogers, new president of the growers' association and senior vice president of cranberry operations for the A.D. Makepeace Co.

"It's early, but indications are not what we expected," Rogers said. "We had a warm December last year, then really cold weather and then a drought this August, which really affects the berries more. They don't have the size at this point."

The local cranberry industry employs about 5,000 people, with fluctuations in business having a significant local ripple effect.

The Cranberry Station, part of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was created by the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers' Association in 1910, and has always been a center of research on the effects weather, insects, and irrigation have on the fruit.

It is also a place where experimental varieties are planted and studied in hopes of coming up with bigger, better, and hardier berries. Thus, the recent new varieties that make up the checkerboard.

Planting it was a labor of love not only for the station, but for area growers as well. The list of donors reads like a who's who in the regional cranberry world, including A.D. Makepeace, Beaton's, DeCran Ag Supplies, Sure-Cran Services, and the Morse Brothers. The companies, which usually compete, together provided $90,000 in volunteers and donated equipment as part of the bigger bog renovation project.

Carolyn DeMoranville, who oversees 11 acres of the station's bogs, said the recent renovation of the Cranberry Station bogs - a $310,000 project, with state and federal funding - was long overdue. (To renovate a bog means to tear up all the old plants and plant new ones, in this case including the new varieties.)

"It's exciting to have the entire farm done at once," she said. "It was reconfigured, reshaped, and we changed [the varieties of cranberries] we planted. It will really help us in our cranberry research."

Near the bog where she spoke was a sign bearing her last name - the name given to one of the new varieties of berries in the checkerboard. It was a fitting memorial for her late father, horticulturist Irving DeMoranville, who worked here for 45 years and was director from 1981 until his retirement in 1996.

Each of the eight varieties planted here will take at least three years to yield fruit and probably five years to be hardy enough for complete study. When it is done, the checkerboard will be, in effect, a cranberry showroom for area growers to come and check out new varieties, she said.

"The Cranberry Station should be a model of innovation the industry should be adopting," Lafleur said.

"The work they do there will really help motivate growers to fall into line behind that standard, and encourage them to renovate their acreage and improve production."

As a way of helping farmers, the state Department of Agriculture and Research this year awarded $1.5 million to the growers' association for a bog renovation program.

Renovating the bogs at the station freed up more room to grow more cranberries, DeMoranville said, and the money generated from berry sales will be used to fund research by university graduate students at the station. Prior to the renovation, the money raised went into the university's cranberry station budget for operating costs.

"In Massachusetts, the future is retooling what we have," DeMoranville said, looking over the bogs in her charge. "We don't have the land base" for more widespread farming.

"For us to stay competitive, it's about retooling and using what we have in a better, more efficient way."