CARVER, Mass. (AP) — About this time of the year, Jarrod Rhodes should be checking on the vines of cranberries that have grown on his bog for decades in southeastern Massachusetts.
Instead, he is watching a backhoe tear up the cranberry bog, exposing the dark peat underneath that will eventually become a meandering stream through the 32-acre (13-hectare) South Meadow Bogs Restoration site. The goal of the six-to-nine-month-long, $1.1 million project is to convert this bog to a wetland that should see the return of native plants like steeplebush and straw-colored flatsedge along with providing habitat for wildlife like wood frogs, hawks and muskrats.
“These bogs were originally built on top of a wetland, so now we’re putting it back to the way it was,” Rhodes said, adding that this bog was “distressed” which gave his family a choice of spending time and money to rebuild it with new vines and irrigation or take state and federal funding to conserve and restore it.
“There were a lot of factors that made this avenue make more sense as opposed to spending the money to rebuild it and waiting five or six years,” said Rhodes, a fourth-generation farmer whose family still has 250 acres (101 hectares) in production.
Nature over housing
This project is part of a growing push by cranberry farmers in Massachusetts to choose conservation over other options to glean extra revenue like converting a bog into solar farms or housing.
The shift comes as the industry is being hit by lower prices for the pinkish crimson berries used in sauce and juice along with the rising cost of producing larger, hybrid varieties. Farmers also are seeing the effects of climate change, which is bringing unpredictable weather like droughts and warmer fall conditions that delay the harvest.
“It’s a tough environment right now economically,” said Brian Wick, the executive director of Massachusetts Cranberries, the state’s growers association. The state started…