There wasn’t a thing wrong with Dresden farmer David Popp’s cranberries this year. They colored up nicely and there was plenty of fruit, arriving not too early, not too late. Yet he mowed down most of his 3.5 acres of vines while they were covered in the dark red berries, harvesting only about 3,000 pounds instead of the usual 60,000 to 70,000.
It was that or lose money on the crop, thanks to a glut in the market. He had learned a hard lesson last year when he spent $3,100 trucking his berries to Decas Cranberry, a juice processor in Carver, Mass., and got less than half the price the processor had projected to pay for it – $15 a barrel instead of $35. The early hints he was getting about this season’s prices were even worse.
“They were being cagey about it,” he said, “which means it would probably be around 7 or 8 bucks or less.”
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