NOVEMBER 2019 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC Cranberry growers expect lower yields


Langley festival gives visitors a first-hand taste of bogs


by RONDA PAYNE LANGLEY – Ocean Spray


provided the 24th annual Fort Langley Cranberry Festival with 10,000 pounds of cranberries to be bagged and sold to visitors – to the relief of organizer Meghan Neufeld. With the Lower Mainland


cranberry harvest running about a week behind, she was worried the festival would be short of fruit. Cooler weather pushed the berries to ripeness just in time for the event on October 12. “This is a beautiful crop,”


she says, which came from a local bog. “About a third of [BC’s entire cranberry] crop will be harvested this weekend.”


Grant Keefer, one of the family members with Ladysmith’s Yellow Point Cranberries and treasurer with the BC Cranberry Growers Association, says that new varieties like Crimson Queen and Demoranville darken earlier and began ripening a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. “Growers are planning fields to harvest according to the fruit TAcy, as we want to hit the optimal range of 30 to 50,” he says. TAcy is a measure of the fruit’s anthocyanin content, which is calculated by analyzing the fruit’s colour. Ocean Spray buys fruit from about 95% of BC’s 78 growers, who receive the best price when their berries hit the optimal anthocyanin level the company sets. This will be important to growers’ wallets as yields will be somewhat down from the exceptionally high crop of 2018, when 1.3 million barrels were harvested.


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Event organizer Meghan Neufeld and key volunteer Jim Dyck sit surrounded by a sea of Ocean Spray cranberries donated to support the 24th annual Cranberry Festival in Fort Langley. RONDA PAYNE PHOTO


(By comparison, 2017 saw 858,941 barrels harvested in BC. BC is home to about 6,400 acres of bog.) “Fruit quality seems fine in the fields from what I hear,” Keefer says. “But there are always improvements to be made. Weather affects every crop. It was a pleasant growing season this year, but whether that helps or hinders the crop is really unknown.” Growers planned to harvest the dominant Stevens variety towards the end of October and into early November. Keefer says new varieties


have delivered the greatest improvements to grower yields and berry quality but


adds that field and crop management is an essential element for long-term viability, regardless of berry variety. Neufeld was glad to again


offer guests of the festival a tour of Brian DeWit’s Riverside Cranberries for a first-hand glimpse of how the harvest works. Visitors were shuttled from the event site to the farm and some were lucky enough to don hip-waders and stand in the bog. The tour gives visitors a personal connection with where the berries and the products they yield come from. “It’s also a way to foster community,” Neufeld says of


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the event, “and teach people about the rich history of cranberries in Langley.” Jim Dyck, former owner of


Frontier Building Supply in Fort Langley, has been involved in the festival for 22 years. He says the early years required perfect weather to get even 2,000 people to


attend. Back then, they also sold cranberries to visitors, but a lot less than the five tons the event goes through now. He notes there is no need to advertise other than on social media and even with the early showers, this year’s festival had approximately 60,000 visitors.


Tree Fruit Competitiveness Fund


The Province of BC has provided funding to enhance the competitiveness of the tree fruit sector.


The fund is open to tree fruit growers, producers, and processors to support three key areas of priority: ● Research: cultivar, disease and pest research. ● Marketing: export market opportunities and market development research.


● Infrastructure: sector-based infrastructure modernization such as new equipment.


The Tree Fruit Competitiveness Fund is jointly delivered by the BC Fruit Growers’ Association and Investment Agriculture Foundation BC.


For details about the Tree Fruit Competitiveness Fund, including eligibility and application forms, please visit www.bcfga.com or iafbc.ca/tree-fruit, or contact funding@iafbc.ca.


Project intake is continous. Apply in advance of project initiation – 8 weeks minimum is recommended.


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BC FRUIT GROWERS’ ASSOCIATION 1-800-619-9022 (ext 1) email: replant@bcfga.com www.bcfga.com


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