UMass Cranberry Harvest Finds the Sweet Spot
If there’s one thing Massachusetts cranberry growers would like you to know, it’s this: No, they absolutely do not add extra spiders to their crops.
“That’s a big myth going around,” said Dylan Schwartz over the roar of pumps bringing in this year’s cranberry harvest. “We don’t put spiders in the bogs.”
Schwartz, an assistant foreman, was on hand at the UMass Cranberry Station in Wareham, MA last week as part of a team of workers from A.D. Makepeace Company, who arrive each year to flood the fields and harvest the crop. Both Makepeace and the UMass Cranberry Station are members of the Ocean Spray growers’ cooperative. The cranberries they and other growers produce will eventually become the juice, sauce, and sweetened dried fruit on grocery store shelves.
After a winter-damaged crop last year, the 2026 yield at the 10.97-acre state bog was looking up. (The station also manages another six-acre bog under a Department of Conservation and Recreation lease.) “You can tell when they’re good,” Schwartz said approvingly, watching the large berries tumble through his conveyer into a truck bed below. “You want to see red.”
By the end of the week, the station’s yield would tally 2,200 barrels of berries, topping the 2,000 average for the state bog, and weighing in as the second-largest harvest on record.
Below the roaring harvester where Schwartz was perched, UMass Cranberry Station director Luis Márquez was pulling on thick, olive-green waders. Having started at the station in June, after a career in biotech and academia, he was ready to venture into the flooded fields to see his first harvest up close.
While other station colleagues peered at the bobbing fruit, Makepeace workers corralled the harvest with vinyl booms into large circles. “This experience working with cranberries has been the most rewarding,” said Márquez, wading in.
“Look at the size of that one!” said Dawna Gauvin, grants and contracts coordinator, admiring an extra-large berry, likely one of several new hybrids being grown at the station. “It looks like an olive,” agreed Márquez.
Over the course of their 16-month growing cycle, these tartly crimson berries have been intensely studied. The small team of UMass researchers have used them to help understand how the plants will grow, what pests affect them, and to gather details on dozens of trial varieties.
Márquez noted that the research done at the station is cohesive by design, extending well beyond diseases. “We take a systematic approach,” he said. “We will miss something if we’re only looking through a pathology lens.”
Inside the modern UMass Cranberry Station building—a short walk away from the bogs—the spacious labs were filled with high-tech equipment, cabinets of carefully pinned cranberry pests, and samples of pathogens like crop fungi.
All of this data has been aimed at answering questions that might help regional growers. Which hybrid varieties have better yields than their heritage counterparts? Can cranberries grow well under solar panels? How can drones help pinpoint where to fertilize? What new ventures might be possible for using the acidic compost of chaff left from the berry harvest?
“The mission of the UMass Cranberry station is to show the sustainability of the industry,” said Márquez. “We’re working very hard here to improve the quality of the berries, to help keep small growers in business.”
This effort has only become more economically difficult over time. That’s even as Massachusetts remains the second-largest producer, second only to Wisconsin. While cranberries are a $1.7 billion industry (generating about $70 million in direct revenue from the state), as with many other food sectors, the financial pressures are immense. The station will earn about $30 per barrel this year—a significant drop from last year’s $40 price per barrel. Not only has the price for cranberries been stalled for decades, but federal funding for crop research has recently also been slashed.
One goal, said Márquez, is to find ways to bring cranberries from the grocery aisles to pharmaceutical products, where they would likely command a higher price for growers. All of that made the station’s ongoing research essential.
“We want to find the sweet spot,” he said. “Coming to these outcomes is only possible through a lot of effort, but also having the right funding.”
There are also some hopeful signs. In early October, the state announced that station researchers would receive a $73,355 grant to study how pesticides, applied by drone, might spread over the crops.
Back at the ongoing harvest, a small problem had cropped up: the pump was plugged. With the flip of a switch, the wide suction hose in the bog reversed direction and belched water. Workers in thick waders and gloves dug around, pulled the snag free, and got the cranberry suction going again.
John Mason and his joyous Australian shepherd Jackpot (“bred to be a fancy agility dog, but really a bog dog”), were keeping a watchful eye on this process. Mason, the assistant general manager of the cranberry operations with A.D. Makepeace, and the owner of Tilson Brook Cranberry farm, has been harvesting cranberries since he was a kid on his dad’s farm.
“This is the best part of the year,” said Mason of harvest time. “This is like Christmas for us.”
For the next several days, a small river of berries would flow into 18-wheelers and head off to the processing facilities. Occasionally, the pumps might also scoop up an unfortunate frog, turtle, or fish, which would be carefully set aside in a bucket at the processing plant to be returned to the bog.
As Mason talked, small brown spiders, natural to the area, skittered across the ground, heading away from the commotion.
Had Mason heard the rumor that growers add the spiders to their fields?
“It’s the number one question I get,” laughed Mason. “It’s a huge myth. But it’s got people talking about cranberries.”