October is harvest time for cranberries and Maine farmers are finding the fruit to be a viable new crop, and another way to diversify their produce. This summer's heavy rains, which harmed many potato and tomato crops, actually helped cranberry bogs.

Just off Route 9 in Aurora, about 30 miles east of Bangor, it's harvest time at the LaPlant family bog. Kathy LaPlant and a friend stand on a large machine that floats on top of a flooded, five-acre cranberry bog. The machine, also called a cranberry beater, churns across the surface of the water.

"Sue is reeling the cranberries off, riding across the water knocking the cranberries off the vine," LaPlant says. "They'll float up tonight and tomorrow we'll take those boards, the booms and that's the traditional pictures you see of a cranberry harvest when the people are in the water pushing with the booms and pushing all the cranberries to one end. And then Wyman's will bring their truck in and suck up the cranberries from that end into a truck and then deliver them to their processing plant."

It's a healthy harvest, LaPlant says, and she'll sell most of it to Jasper Wyman & Son in Milbridge. Before she flooded the bog, she did a dry harvest, which involves raking the tart, red berries and selling them to local grocery stores and farmers' markets.

"I just picked a few dry ones," she says. "They're all the same cranberries. So the difference between a dry and a wet harvest is simply that the dry cranberries have a longer shelf life, they're traditionally what you'll see in the grocery store in the produce department. And then when you flood these they've now become wet so they don't have as long a shelf life so these are usually taken to a processing plant. But the other thing you can do with wet cranberries that people don't really realize - you clean them off, put them in ziploc bags and freeze them."

LaPlant says the summer rain didn't allow as much sunshine as she would have liked, but wet weather can prove helpful to her crop.
"We've had some dry summers -- it's helped us have some really nice vine growth, it helped a lot of the vines really sink in and take \
ahold," she says. "The other thing about the rain is it's really expensive to water your cranberries because you're using fuel. And with the cost of fuel going up, that was all free watering for that month, so that was helpful."

LaPlant is one of about 30 cranberry growers in Maine, according to Charles Armstrong, a cranberry expert with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. "Cranberries seem to be offering a niche for already existing farmers just to diversify their operations," he says. "A handful have wild blueberries and there's a midsize grower who has apples."

Armstrong says most of Maine's cranberry growers are located in Washington County, because that's where some out-of-state growers first set up bogs nearly two decades ago. "What really got the ball rolling here in Maine were some growers from Massachusetts that were transplants that came up to Maine and started working with our Maine Department of Agriculture and the University to see about potential for an industry here and it's just been steadily growing ever since then."

Maine saw its first modern commercial harvest in 1991. Last year, Maine cranberry bogs produced more than 1100 tons, worth more than $1.3 million to growers, according to Armstrong. Startup costs are high, which prevents more farmers from entering the small industry, but Armstrong says that's not necessarily a bad thing.

"There's a lot of local demand that I think smaller growers benefit from, to be able to take part in farmers' markets and that kind of thing. The advantage I see there is that it leaves them a bit immune from the ups and downs of the pricing that takes place nationwide, which is largely Ocean Spray-driven. So if Ocean Spray has a bad year, the entire industry has a bad year for large growers that are subject to that. So I think the key is in Maine to stay small."

Back at the LaPlant family bog in Aurora, Kathy LaPlant says she's hoping to get about 85 cents a pound for her wet harvest berries.
"Eighty-five cents a pound is a good amount but that won't be true this year, unfortunately, because of the economy. There's less demand. They're a very healthy product but sometimes it's sort of considered a luxury."

Based on the health of this year's harvest, Charlie Armstrong predicts the statewide crop will be valued at $1 million dollars.