[gentle music] - Karen Haugen: Thank you for joining us this evening at the Sons of Norway Mandt Lodge in Stoughton.

Our lodge has been active since 1926, and we are very excited to be celebrating our 100th anniversary all year and with a banquet in October.

Tonight's presentation is titled "Cranberries: How Wisconsin Became the Best."

And this is a crash course in how the geography, climate, sociology, and farming culture of Wisconsin all combine to make us the most productive cranberry region in the world.

Our speaker is Allison Jonjak.

Allison grew up in a cranberry marsh founded by her grandfather in 1939, and after studying agricultural engineering and soil chemistry, she worked with row crop farmers until the University of Wisconsin created a Cranberry Outreach Specialist position, which she happily took.

That position has allowed Allison to work in Wisconsin as a liaison between cranberry growers and researchers-- her favorite state and her favorite crop.

So, please join me in welcoming Allison Jonjak and PBS Wisconsin.

[audience applauds] - Allison Jonjak: Thank you so much for having me.

I'm Allison Jonjak.

And I am really grateful to be at such a beautiful place with such wonderful people as yourselves.

And I'm happy to share today about "Cranberries: How Wisconsin Became Best," and of course, also, a little bit of background on the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And you are likely familiar with the teaching.

You are likely familiar with the research.

Extension is bringing into real life the Wisconsin vision, which is to bring the research that's done at the university into the hands of every Wisconsinite.

So, typically, my role as a Cranberry Outreach Specialist works directly with growers, as well as researchers.

This is a little bit of a side tour out of my standard to get to communicate with the rest of the people of Wisconsin about cranberries.

So, thanks for giving me the opportunity to step out of my normal role and communicate with you all.

"How Wisconsin Became Best," a crash course in the geography, climate, sociology, farming culture of Wisconsin all combined to make us the most productive cranberry region in the world.

And we're gonna start off with climate.

When glaciers covered Wisconsin, cameras had not been invented yet.

And so, I've borrowed a picture from Alaska.

But you are all certainly familiar with how glaciers sculpted our state and flattened a good part of the center of the state and left the rest a little mountainous.

You'll see if you compare the map of where we grow cranberries in Wisconsin.

And this is a heat map, so the darker a red color is, the more cranberries are grown there.

When you look at this map of Wisconsin, you can see all of the areas where cranberry is grown have a lot in common.

And those things that they have in common are water and sand, both that the glaciers left us, and then, most importantly, acidic soils.

This is a picture of sphagnum moss, and this is one of the first-- We can gloss and call it a plant.

One of the first plants that came back and lived in Wisconsin again after the glaciers.

Sphagnum moss is a very tenacious organism.

It grabs nutrients and it holds them really tightly.

And it naturally has this really low pH.

And as sphagnum moss grows and grows, it stacks up on top of itself, and as it grows and dies, it compresses itself into peat.

I took this picture up in Newfoundland when I was working with the cranberry growers there.

In Wisconsin, we don't really do much harvesting of our peat and selling it for gardeners, but in Newfoundland, Canada, they still do.

So, this is a picture of what peat looks like when being excavated.

So, the sphagnum moss-- The glaciers retreated.

The sphagnum moss kind of moved in.

And then the first vascular plants to be able to survive in this really acidic, really harsh environment are the ericoid species, which are cranberries.

And this is a picture here of cranberries and another ericoid species of brown bush growing together in a natural peatland in Wisconsin.

And I'll go into a little more depth on soil chemistry in a minute here.

But the second most important thing to cranberries after that acidic soil is water.

Water is absolutely everything for cranberry growers.

The statewide average, there's six acres of support land for every one acre of commercial production cranberry.

The purpose of that is, as rain falls, they're able to collect and have water on hand for cranberry use.

And so, this is an image of a cranberry marsh in the background.

A new planting is being made over there.

That's the sandy color.

And then you see the native wetland that is just exactly how-- exactly how nature wanted it to be.

And then, I've got, I guess, a little bit more detail here.

And you're probably familiar with the settlement area era of Wisconsin, when people were inviting new immigrants to come and settle in Wisconsin, and they all talk about how safe it is and how great the crops are.

And I found really great historical maps from the Vilas County Historical Society.

And I'm gonna zoom in here.

They show good farm ground, fair farm ground, low-productivity farm ground, and then peat.

And if you zoom in here, there's an awful lot of peat in Vilas County.

You'll see that Vilas County is one of the more productive cranberry counties.

And I was able to find the actual surveyor's notes from when they were originally scouting this land.

The surveyor notes, "The land is all open swamp and marsh-- unfit for cultivation."

So, they're doing their best to say, "Hey, come to Wisconsin.

"It's beautiful.

"You'll have great farms.

"But maybe not right here.

"Maybe not where it's low pH.

Maybe not where it's so difficult for plants to thrive."

And then, as a trained soil chemist, I apologize for giving you more soil chemistry than you might have wanted, but low pH environments are really hard to live in.

I don't know how many times I can say that, and I'll still need to say it again.

But in this chart where the bar is fattest, the mineral is most available.

So, if you look at where corn is grown, at, like, 6.2 to 6.8, you see that nitrogen's bar is really, really available.

So, at the pH that corn loves, it's easy for the plants to take up nitrogen.

It's easy for the plants to take up phosphorus.

It's easy for the plants to take up potassium.

I've added those red lines because that is where cranberries love to live.

And you can see that it's really hard to get nitrogen.

It's really hard to get phosphorus.

It's pretty hard to get potassium.

There's a whole lot of iron.

That's nice, but mostly plants need nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, and sulfur to live.

And so, the cranberries are really fighting for this.

I talk about how the sphagnum moss holds on really tightly to nutrients.

And so does the soil in those environments.

If you have a nitrate ion and you put it in the low pH environment, all of the Hs-- the floating-- are gonna glom onto that nitrate and you're gonna have ammonium.

So, there's just not freely available nitrogen.

So, cranberries evolved to survive and thrive in this really difficult circumstance.

The way they do that is, there's these really cool fibrous root mats.

I was able to take these pictures from Amaya Atucha's lab as the cranberry physiologist.

I believe she's a plant physiologist.

But she does a lot of wonderful work in cranberries.

And grown hydroponically, the roots of cranberries don't have root hairs, like your normal corn or tomatoes do.

They have these fibrous mats.

And then next to that, I've got a picture of a root that I pulled up.

And, of course, it's always a little less beautiful on its way out of the soil.

But these roots, unlike corn and tomatoes, which are actively trading the soils for their nutrients, these roots are the home of a bunch of mycorrhizal fungi.

So, there are tiny little fungal spores that live inside the cranberry root tissue.

The cranberry says, "I'm really hungry.

I need a phosphorus."

And it sends out a hormonal cue that is asking for phosphorus.

The fungal spore wakes up when it hears that hormone-- It smells that hormone, whatever.

It wakes up, it... This fungus is able to grab the phosphorus ion strongly enough from the soil and the sphagnum moss that it gets the phosphorus ion.

It then tells the cranberry plant, "Got your phosphorus ion."

The cranberry has photosynthesized and made a sugar.

And so, the cranberry gives the sugar to the fungus.

The fungus gives the phosphorus to the cranberry.

The cranberry gets the phosphorus it needs.

And the fungus turns back into a spore to wait for the next time the cranberry's hungry for phosphorus.

And so, this really, really elaborate dance has to happen every time the cranberry needs nutrients.

And that is why so few plants are able to survive in this really, really acidic, difficult situation.

Cool, and I guess it's-- Oh, I guess one other thing-- If you were to take a corn seed and plant it in the peat bog or the sand bog that is a cranberry marsh, the corn plant would not-- It would germinate and it would use the sugar that was already in its seed.

But then it would die, 'cause it couldn't get any more nutrients than that.

It's just not able to take them up 'cause it didn't evolve in that really harsh environment.

This slide is just a happy, little... "Did you know that the cranberry gets its name from the mascot, the sandhill crane?"

You can see the photo of cranberry blossoms and how obviously those eating crane shapes look together.

And, of course, they occupy the same sort of harsh territory.

I'm gonna then transition from the geography and the soil history and into a little bit of Wisconsin culture.

Mashkiigimin is the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe word for cranberries.

And I'm telling stories that I've gotten directly from members of the LCO tribe.

Their historical uses, culinarily, they were used fresh.

One thing that's neat is, after-- You might be aware that cranberries are kind of tart and maybe not everyone's favorite flavor if you don't have sugar, and, indeed, the Anishinaabe did not have sugar in those days.

If you let a frost freeze the berries a little bit after they're ripe, they're somewhat sweeter.

And so, they would-- They'll stay on the vine sweeter after a frost.

And so, the tribe would often go and harvest them after they'd frozen.

But harvested before freezing, they can be dried or smoked.

They can be kind of boiled down into sauces that provide a lot of valuable vitamin C over the winter, when there's not as much vitamin C available.

And they can also be mixed in pemmican, so a fatty meat that can also be preserved and used over the winter as a vitamin C source.

Again, medicinal, against scurvy in winters.

The Anishinaabe are also aware of the urinary tract health benefits of cranberries.

There's uses as a tea against diabetes that I have less of an innate understanding of how that works.

And then general health that are, today, we kind of analogize to, "Okay, now we understand that this is antioxidants."

But the Anishinaabe were aware of that as well.

Cranberries are still growing wild and picked wild on the reservation.

And then I'll add, also, I know less personally-- Just because I grew up near the Lac Courte Oreilles tribe of Ojibwe, I know more of those stories.

I know less of the Ho-Chunk stories.

But cranberries are also really important to the Ho-Chunk people and their-- You know, here's some nice photographs of some Ho-Chunk workers harvesting cranberries by hand.

So, that's kind of, like, you know, after the glaciers, before the settlers.

And then we'll kind of move into Wisconsin's first commercial cranberry marshes.

These original cranberry growers would largely live down south.

And I say "down south," I mean Chicago.

But they would... [all laugh] They would largely live down south and then either bring up from Chicago or hire locally harvesting crews.

And they are just huge harvesting crews.

And with these huge harvesting crews, they would pick about six barrels to the acre.

You say, "What's a barrel?"

I say, "Here's some nice photographs of barrels."

Here are some sorting crews picking out rotten or white berries and then packing the cranberries into barrels for railroad train transport.

Even though boxes stack more easily, the cool thing about a barrel is, one worker alone can rock it until it's up on its side or rock it until it's back down again, and then it can be rolled.

So, it was easier to carry a heavier weight.

A barrel's a volume measurement that's roughly 100 pounds.

But then going back to these folks picking, picking cranberries one by one would average about six barrels to the acre.

The last Ag Census in 2018, Wisconsin's average is 268 barrels to the acre.

And you can see a little bit of difference between the cranberry marsh of today and the cranberry marsh of the 1850s there.

So, Wisconsin's first commercial marshes.

I had mentioned, again, people would live southerly, come up for the harvest, sell their fruit, and then go back to where they actually lived.

Taking off my university hat, legend has it that there was a forest fire that wiped out someone's cranberry marsh.

And so, he brought his crew up and he had, you know, his 200 people or whatever, and they got there, and there were no cranberries to harvest.

And he-- "Oh, crap, now I have to, you know... Okay, back to square one."

So, he decided to build a house there and live there all year 'round.

Having lived there all year 'round, he said, "Not only can I protect against forest fires, but I can also protect against winter frost, spring frost."

And that is probably the largest innovation that was able to raise yields from six barrels to the acre to the level that we have now.

I took a quick picture here just because it illustrates in the winter, when there's a cold snap, cranberry growers raise a flood over their crop and then they will drain-- Like, they will let the cold snap freeze 12 to 18 inches of ice, and then they'll drain the rest of the water out from under that.

So, there will be this igloo or ice blanket protecting the cranberry plant over the course of the winter.

That's necessary because the cranberry has an 18-month crop cycle.

In July, as it's growing the fruit to be harvested in October, it's also setting the bud that is going to become the blossom the following June and the fruit the following July to be harvested the following October.

So, after the cranberry farmer harvests this year's crop, that farmer is still protecting next year's crop as well.

So, that's where this ice blanket comes in.

And that was-- I can finish my legend and I can put my university hat back on and say that the first cranberry growers to optimize for cranberry production started protecting from frost for that coming year.

I'll talk just quickly about... This is a 1905 census, even though it's a 1940 map, but showing where the different immigrant populations settled in that first batch of Wisconsin.

And then one thing that is neat to notice.

I have a side hobby as a folk dancer.

And I had some friends from the East Coast say, "Did you know this cool song from turn-of-the-century Wisconsin?"

You know, "All day in the marshes, our rakes we will pull, "and we feel the best when our boxes are full.

"In the evening, we'll dance 'til we're all tired out and wish the cranberries would never give out."

But it's a nice little poem about everybody kind of coming together and harvesting cranberries together after hay season, after wheat season.

And this is kind of the last, the last late harvest of the year.

And I really enjoyed that.

I used to try to always give this talk when wearing my "Wisconsin Cranberries" shirt that shows the cross section of a cranberry.

If you take a ripe, fresh cranberry and you bite it in half, you'll see basically this exact image.

You'll see the seeds clustered around the center and you'll see those pockets.

The cranberry has a texture that's like an apple.

So, even if it didn't have the pockets, it would still float.

But the fact that those cranberries float is what allows us to harvest in the modern way that I'll be talking about in just a minute here.

Cool, so, we've gotten a little bit of chemistry, a little bit of geology, a little bit of sociology.

We're next gonna talk about the culture of innovation and the culture of farming in Wisconsin.

And I have two photos here.

After the innovation of using ice to protect against cold, the next biggest innovation in cranberry cultivation was sprinkler irrigation.

So, in my grandfather's day, in order to protect from frost, you needed to raise a flood.

And that can be a process.

Depending on your marsh, it could take 12 hours, it could take 36 hours, it could take a very long time.

And you needed to think in advance, "What is the weather going to do?"

Once pumps and irrigation sprinklers were invented, a cranberry grower said, "You mean to tell me I could know in 10 minutes "it's gonna get cold and I'm gonna turn on my sprinklers, and I'm gonna have frost protection?"

And so, sprinkler frost protection was a huge, huge step in being able to protect not in the winter against the long, long cold, but in the spring during maple syrup season when it is above freezing in the day and below freezing at night.

The below freezing at night can still kill your cranberries.

And so, in the early days, they would have to flood for weeks on end or raise a flood, and then the water would run low of oxygen, and then they'd come back with fresh water and raise a flood again.

Now, we can have temperature sensors in the beds.

And because cranberries are in a lowland, there's a little microclimate, and it can be even 15 degrees colder in my house versus in my cranberry bed.

You have a temperature sensor down at bed level.

And when that buzzes, you wake up and you turn on your irrigation and then you are safe.

The next photo-- I wish I had higher resolution.

This is a photo from Oregon.

But as soon as rural electrification made it to Oregon, the very first thing this cranberry farmer did was put a drill with some whiskers on a-- like, a hoe and then went out and started whacking weeds.

That's the first thing he did with electricity.

[chuckles] And so, you can see the large benefit of that.

So, culture of innovation.

I know a lot of people in this room have farming roots as well.

So, you're probably familiar with this.

And I'm just gonna give a quick little tour of the development of cranberry harvest.

So, this is a very early cranberry harvest.

You can tell it's New Jersey because they have the nice beach umbrella in the background.

[audience laughs] The original harvest method was picking.

And clearly bring your entire family.

The next step up from that-- and you'll be able to see it in a little bit closer resolution soon-- was raking, and originally people would dry rake.

So, doing the same thing as handpicking, just with a box and teeth combs instead of your fingers.

But then again, there was a frost one harvest, because if you're 15 degrees colder than the highland, you can still freeze in July.

You can still freeze in August.

You can obviously freeze in October when it's harvesttime.

So, somebody put on a flood and they took off their flood and they said, "Hey, my cranberries "are trying really hard to float.

"Since they're floating, "why don't we just keep raking them while they're kind of floating?"

And so, this is-- I just got this video from Ed Grygleski of Valley Corp.

in Tomah.

And since they're floating, it's gonna be a little bit easier to hand rake these.

You can see... This was taken in Tomah.

I unfortunately don't have the year.

But this method of harvest is clearly a labor of love, a labor of shoulders, a labor of your lumbar area.

And I've done a fair amount of hand raking in my role as the Cranberry Outreach Specialist.

I've also done a lot of field trials.

And in order to say, "How did this treatment work against this treatment?"

you need to harvest those meter, you know, meter-square plots.

And so, I daresay there are not too many cranberry growers-- Growers will still use this technique to take a color sample.

So, they'll say, "Am I ready to harvest yet?"

I'll take out my grandpa's old rake and I'll rake a sample.

And then I'll send that to-- whether their processor is Ocean Spray or Mariani or Badger State Fruit.

They'll send one with their truck driver and say, "Is this bed ready yet?"

And the processor will say yes or no.

So, everyone still uses their grandpa's rake a couple times a year.

But I feel like as a researcher, I've used the hand rake a little more than the average person in 2026.

And this is just, again, showing they are beautiful.

All right, so that's-- So, that's hard on your shoulders.

And one fellow-- This is actually out of New Jersey.

There was a cranberry marsh, two sons.

One son took over the cranberry marsh.

One son went into airplane engine design.

But then the son who took over the marsh passed away unexpectedly.

And so, the airplane design son moved back onto the marsh and said, "Boy, my shoulders hurt.

Let me design something better."

And so, this Getsinger picker, named after Mr.

Getsinger, is basically that same rake box with the tines on a conveyor belt.

So, it's raking and then pulling up and then dumping into a box at the back of that-- at the back of that picker.

And this is my grandfather running a Getsinger picker.

My Uncle Stanley with no shirt in the background there.

And you can see they'd rest the waiting boxes ready to be filled up.

And then they'd stack the full boxes to be taken back to the warehouse for sorting.

Cranberry growers will innovate yet again and say, "Boy, this Getsinger picker is way easier than hand raking, but I wish I was sitting down."

And so, here is-- I believe this is Mr.

Rezin, judging by the house in the background, because you can still see, "Oh, yeah, his grandson lives there now."

So, this is a Getsinger picker that's ride-along.

And then, the next innovation-- and you've got me in the foreground there removing that sprinkler irrigation-- is the beater.

And so, with the beater, you raise a flood that's about calf-deep.

And then, those beaters have reels that are going-- And if you know, like, a wheat reel with the tines, it's that, but with no tines, and it's like a lawn mower motor driving this reel and you're kind of walking behind it.

And you've got that calf-deep flood.

So, the cranberries are gonna float up to the surface.

And then, once the cranberries have floated up to the surface, you can corral them.

I missed one element of innovation here.

Originally they were corralled with wooden planks, like plain cedar with no knots and hooks and loops and you'd connect them together.

After one of the major oil spills, a cranberry grower saw that oil spill boom and said, "Hey, part of that floats and part of that sinks "and it corrals the oil spill.

I wonder if that could corral cranberries."

And, lo and behold, called up Texas Oil Boom Company, which remains one of the suppliers of cranberry boom to this day.

There are, of course, a few others in Warrens that also produce.

But that is genuinely, "That works well for oil spill containment.

I bet it would help us harvest cranberries."

So, these cranberries are boomed together, corralled, run up an elevator into a wagon, and then sorted in a grass machine.

And then, we're not done yet.

You might be familiar with the back of Charlie Berens' head, but he here is attempting to hand rake in front of a harrow.

So, the harrow is one step faster than a beater.

It does have a little bit more weight on the soil, but it's got these springs that are set upside down, so they just kind of gently rake the berries off of the vines.

And then, once those berries are off the vines, you'll raise the flood more.

And this here is a berry pump.

A berry pump is actually technology that somebody saw in fish farming.

And so, they saw that they were able to pull fish with pumps, and they were like, "If it's gentle enough for a fish, I bet it's gentle enough for a cranberry."

And so, these jets of water propel the berries up and into that pump.

They go up, and sorted into the left are all of the leaves and all of the water.

This dump truck has been specially modified to dump water back into either-- It's got a valve, so it can either put water into the bed that you're still harvesting from or it can put water into the next bed, if you want to raise the level at the next bed.

And then it's mesh.

So, the leaves all stay in that dump truck, and then they're gone and taken to an area where they get composted.

And then, different marshes will either use those compost to help rebuild dikes-- You can see the dikes get a little wet and you need to rebuild them from time to time.

Others sell it as compost for gardens.

And then, to the right go all of the cranberries.

And the cranberries are then already cleaned from their leaves and taken on to the processor.

So, that is the story arc of farmer innovation.

But all farmers innovate.

What makes us cranberry farmers kind of especially good at this?

Why do cranberry farmers stand out from the pack?

Mechanical innovation-- All farmers do this.

Agronomic innovation.

And I'll show, also-- This is a boom spreader.

And so, this allows exactly the right amount of fertilizer to be placed in exactly the right place, with no off-target application, and very efficiently.

And that lets cranberry growers make their very small spoon-feeding applications of nutrients.

If you overfeed a cranberry, it is going to feel too luxurious, and it is going to put all of its energy into growing leaves and planning for the future by being a really big, bushy plant.

But we like to sell fruit instead of leaves, so we have to give it enough to survive, but not so much that it feels comfortable.

We want to keep it right on the edge of starvation-- not starvation, but right on the edge of starvation.

And so, the ability to make very small applications of nutrients and then watch.

When does the plant need more?

When does the plant need more?

I'm not gonna give it more until it really needs it.

So, this boom spreader is one of the agronomic innovations that helps with that.

But, again, agronomic innovations, all farmers do this.

But cooperative innovation is a little bit less common.

And so, you can imagine if you're selling a fresh product to grocery stores or to, you know, whoever's buying it on the railroad, you get kind of a winner-take-all.

The first guy to market is able to sell at a higher price, and the last guy to market might not be able to sell at all if the market has dried up.

And so, Judge Gaynor out of Cranmor hires a fellow to begin the Wisconsin Sales Company.

And they say, "Okay, "I'm gonna pool together with a bunch of growers.

"We're all gonna commit our fruit.

"We're gonna let this good salesman "handle promotion and placement and sales "and working with all the grocery stores.

"And then, we're going to be able to pool the output "so that no one person gets a hugely high price "while someone else gets zero this year, "and we can kind of balance out and make sure that everyone's fruit gets sold."

And they were winding up selling more fruit because the salesman was better.

For example, you know, giving you a better name: Eatmor.

[audience chuckles] This was popular in Wisconsin and so effective so quickly that New Jersey and Massachusetts followed the very next year.

And then, three years later, they all merged to become the American Cranberry Exchange.

So, originally, Eatmor sold raw cranberries.

Fresh cranberries were the primary way that Americans consumed cranberries.

And after the invention of the can, we started to have canned cranberry sauce, and Ocean Spray set up as a similar co-op.

While Eatmor handled the high-dollar, more valuable fresh market, Ocean Spray handled the, "Okay, here's what's left, we'll can it."

Eventually, the canned market grew larger than the fresh market, and eventually, Ocean Spray and Eatmor kind of butted heads.

And eventually, Ocean Spray was kind of the winning cranberry cooperative.

And it's really neat to see how the fact that the cranberry industry is so culturally steeped in this cooperative, because all of the cranberry growers, you're raising your kid to fix engines and you're raising your kid to manage water flow, and you're raising your kid to understand how plant nutrition works.

And you're also raising your kid to raise a business-- run a business and cooperate with everyone else who's a cranberry grower.

This is from a 2006 paper on the cranberry industry, but "the stockholders of Ocean Spray "and of any cooperative are not merely stockholders.

"Their interests go beyond making a profit "on their investment.

"They are suppliers to, as well as owners of, their company.

"They have the right and responsibility "to manage the company.

"They hire professional management "to carry out their objectives, but not to independently operate the company."

And the goal of cranberry growers in being part of Ocean Spray is not necessarily the most profit this year.

It's to have a sustainable industry that's going to be able to continue to buy cranberries from cranberry growers and sell cranberries to people throughout the world for generations to come.

And you really see that through the cranberry industry.

This is a picture from 1900 of the very-- at least to my knowledge, the very first Cranberry Growers summer meeting.

This is a summer picnic, again at the Gaynor farm.

And this is 2024's.

This is being held at the Cranberry Innovation Center.

The photo was obviously taken by a drone.

You can see little yellow school buses that are taking groups of growers around where I have seven researchers at various stations on this research farm talking about the research that they're doing and sharing that with growers.

There's fried chicken, there's all kinds of vendors.

And we still have people coming together twice a year to share, to learn together.

And we want to talk a little bit about what makes not just cranberries special, but also what makes Wisconsin special.

So, New Jersey and Massachusetts also had these cooperatives.

And so, we're gonna talk a little bit about the pivot from the 1990s, or when Wisconsin really started to become the leader in the world.

And we eclipsed the Bay State in 1995.

And you can see in this figure here that Wisconsin has always been a major player, but really has-- again, since 1995, have really, really brought it home for the world cranberry production.

That's largely because of better economics.

This is a chart from USDA National Ag Statistics Service.

And you can see, for a couple of reasons, cost of production is simply lower in Wisconsin.

Part of that is because we have less competition for the land.

With Massachusetts, Cape Cod is a very nice place to have your vacation home.

And part of that is because with some of the more modern construction of the beds, we gain a lot of productivity.

And so, I've got just a Google Image search-- sorry-- Google Maps search of the largest Massachusetts marsh on the top and a Google Maps view of the largest Wisconsin marsh in the bottom.

And these marshes are fairly comparable in acreage.

But if you think again back to that boom spreader that I showed earlier about how nutrients are applied, you can see that it's gonna be a lot easier to do a marsh that's made of rectangles.

And so, you can see here's the boom applicator, versus in Massachusetts, they need to use a helicopter.

And if you have noticed the price of diesel fuel lately-- and I'm sure helicopter fuel is not so different from diesel fuel-- you're going to be lamenting that you aren't able to use this boom truck.

So, Wisconsin, partly the more agronomic-friendly state climate, and partly the less pressure from land on, you know, people's vacation cottages, and then partly this economics of these more modern bed shapes have really made the difference.

Wisconsin also has a really fantastic partnership with its university.

One of the first ways that I became aware of that was through the UW-Madison Extension Cranberry Leadership Program.

The Wisconsin Cranberry Board kind of funds this, but they have Extension take a huge role in developing a curriculum on team leadership and personality styles, public speaking, public relations, how the cranberry ecosystem all works together.

And that's in partnership with Cranberry Growers as well as the university.

And that's a yearlong program that when someone's son or daughter says, "I'm feeling ready to step up into that next level of leadership," whether it's through their handler, or cranberry buyers group, or through the Growers Association, saying, "I'm ready, I want to learn how to do this," and giving that leadership training.

The incoming Growers Association board president for 2024 said, "Every person on our board went through that leadership program, "and I can't speak for everyone but myself.

"I wouldn't have the confidence "to lead the Growers Association board if I hadn't been through this program."

And that really shows that program as, I believe, in its... 12th instance, so 24 years in existence.

I took a survey in 2024 saying, "Has someone from my marsh "participated on any boards or committees in the cranberry industry?"

And 56% had in the last 10 years.

And if you think of any industry and if you brought a bunch of people together and said, "Do you have a voice in your industry?"

How many industries would you have more than 50% of the people raise their hand and say, "Yeah, in the last 10 years, I've had a voice in my industry."

And in cranberries, almost 60% in the last 10 years and more than 70% in total are part of working with their industry.

I promised climate.

Here's Joe Fitch.

It is -50.

[chuckles] And Joe might not love that -50 temperature reading.

But other organisms do not love a -50 temperature reading.

This is a bunch of pathogens that cause cranberry fruit rot, and cranberry fruit rot pathogens do not love -50.

This is a tiny worm that we call the cranberry fruitworm, and he is burrowing inside of a cranberry and eating the fruit and leaving it an empty shell behind.

And that cranberry fruitworm also does not love, does not love -50 degrees.

So, Wisconsin-- If you look back at the other producing states-- Washington, Oregon, New Jersey, Massachusetts-- as coastal states, they have milder winters than Wisconsin has.

When we're able to freeze out our southerly tourists, we are also freezing out some of our least-preferred insect neighbors and fungal neighbors.

And then, another thing that I'll note.

In the raising the winter flood, letting that 12 to 18 inches of ice freeze, draining the water out from under it, in Wisconsin, we've been doing that for 150 years, and we're still doing it.

In Massachusetts, and in New Jersey, and in Oregon, and in Washington, they were doing that at the beginning, but they're having fewer and fewer cold snaps where they're able to get a good layer of ice.

One thing that we do with that layer of ice, in addition to protecting the plants from frost, is we drive dump trucks on it with a thin layer of sand, and we'll sprinkle 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch of sand.

Usually the sand that's right on site, that's the same that the beds are constructed of.

And that sand layer does even a better job of burying.

When the ice melts, the sand is gonna filter down on top of the cranberry vines.

It gives the vines a hormonal cue to send out more runners.

So, it's kind of the equivalent of pruning your grapevines.

Instead of having to cut off dead tissue, it buries the dead tissue and then sets newer, vigorous growth.

The vigorous growth is gonna set more fruit.

But then at the same time, you're burying your old tissue.

So, if you think about things that had pathogen infections, or if you're thinking about things that were insect eggs, they're now buried below a layer of sand.

And then, over time, my-- The oldest beds that my dad has on his marsh are 86 or 87 years old.

That-- Those beds are still producing at the maximum capacity for that variety.

If you maintain your cranberry beds well, they'll keep producing longer than a lifetime.

The only reason to replant cranberries is if you want a new variety.

But this sanding practice that we do to refresh our vines and keep them fresh and also bury the insect eggs, bury the fungi, over time creates this cool layer cake of peat sand, peat sand, peat sand that's really advantageous for growing.

But Massachusetts and New Jersey and Washington and Oregon are having a harder and harder time building ice that you can drive on.

And so, they're looking at-- farmer innovation-- various kind of sandblasting or blowing or they're doing barge sanding.

So, they'll have little floating barges and they'll have people kind of pushing the sand off behind, doing their best to emulate-- This practice was originally developed actually-- Captain Hall is the first commercial cranberry grower in America.

He was a fisherman out on Cape Cod, and he happened to also own land on Cape Cod that had cranberries.

He, whether he heard it or guessed it or intuited it, but found out, "Hey, this is a good scurvy cure for my men.

So, I'm gonna bring cranberries out to my fishermen."

And he noticed the ocean blowing sand over his cranberry vines and saw that after the sand covered them, they'd have that extra runner growth, and then they'd set more fruit in future years.

So, that's the history of that practice.

Yeah, so climate, very important.

So, they're curious in Washington, in Massachusetts, "What do we do with milder winters?"

And when you have a question about, what are you gonna do as conditions change, whether those are climatic conditions, whether those are, you know, whatever conditions might be changing, farmers need to adapt.

The more technologically advanced and the higher yields we're getting, the harder it is to answer these questions with all their little details.

And so, cranberry growers in Wisconsin have this great relationship with the University of Wisconsin.

And there are in, you know, in Madison here, under the USDA-- United States Department of Agriculture-- there's Juan Zalapa, who's doing work in genetics.

And so, if you say to Juan, "What are we gonna do if we don't have as good of-- as good of pathogen control from our cold winters?"

And Juan says, "That's cool.

"It takes a long, long time to breed new cranberry varieties, "but I've been working on some that are more resistant to pathogens."

A lot of times, these are ones with waxier coatings.

And so, you ask Juan, "Show me all of the list of varieties with waxy coatings."

And he says, "Oh, here's my varieties with waxy coatings that we're looking at."

You might say, "I've got this question about how insects are gonna change "and insects are gonna bring different-- "are gonna hatch in different patterns.

"Because if I know I need to be concerned about, "I'll set out my pheromone traps "for blackheaded fireworm at such and such a time.

Do I need to do that sooner?"

You'll ask Shawn Steffan, who's the USDA entomologist, and he says, "I've been working on growing degree days "for blackheaded fireworm, "and here's when we should be putting out our pheromone traps to see when there's a problem."

You might be curious about unlocking soil-available phosphorus.

There's a lot of work being done about keeping Wisconsin's water both plentiful and clean.

And so, we want to think about, "If there's phosphorus locked up in the soil, "is there a way that if phosphorus is already there, "is there a way we could ask that cranberry plant "to consume the phosphorus that's already in the soil and kind of take it out of the system?"

And so, Jyostna Mura's doing that work that I showed earlier on those fungi that can selectively unbind that phosphorus.

Shinya Ikeda is doing a lot of work in the health benefits of cranberries and, as well, doing work in different possible-- You might remember I first talked about fresh fruit.

And then, there's the canned cranberry sauce.

Each time a new product is invented-- After juice was invented, now the canned market is small and the fresh fruit market is small, but juice is huge.

And then, after the sweetened dried cranberry, or Craisin, was invented, now Craisins and sweetened dried cranberries are the most consumed form of cranberry, with juice falling behind and sauce and fresh left behind again.

So, Dr.

Ikeda is both working on some of the inherent-- Proanthocyanidins are the color compound of cranberry.

And that's also got a lot of antioxidant properties, as well as a couple of antibacterial properties.

And so, Dr.

Ikeda is working on those.

That USDA NRCS column is largely-- The federally-funded researchers tend to work on core, basic, elemental-level science that's gonna take 20 to 30 years to develop and be usable to the growers.

But we absolutely need to invest in that basic science.

And then, the next column, this CALS faculty, are the College of Ag and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, and they're solving sometimes the 20- and 30-year questions, but also the two-year and five-year and one-year questions.

So, you'll say to Jed, "Hey, Jed, I've always had these woody perennials "like dewberry and maple trees that are problem weeds.

"But in the last two years, "I saw that I've also got Virginia creeper.

What can I do about that?"

And Jed, as the weed scientist, is going to come up with responses that we can do with that Virginia creeper.

Jed is also doing research on where weeds come from in new beds.

So, he's taking samples-- When you plant a new bed, ideally, if you do good weed control up front, you won't have to chase it and make it harder over time.

So, he's taking samples of the soil from new beds, the water from new beds, the dike seeding material from new beds, and the pallets that new vines are brought in on and said, "Oh, we have to start cleaning our pallets because that's bringing a lot of weed seeds."

So, really cool research like that.

Amaya Atucha focuses on plant physiology, and so she is the person that everyone comes with-- comes to with questions for spring frost protection, for when the plant comes into and out of dormancy, and then, also, in the perennial plant, when does it take in nutrients and when does it store nutrients in the fruit, versus the leaves, versus the roots, so that we can make applications when the plant is going to use them.

We're currently hiring a new entomology role at that tactical level.

Leslie Holland is a doctor of plant pathology, and she's been doing really cool research on some of those fungal pathogens I talked about.

But there's also-- There was an insect pest back in the '30s that almost ended the industry by spread-- Kind of like a tick spreads Lyme disease, this blunt-nosed leafhopper spreads false blossom disease, which is an incurable disease that prevents the plant from making fruit.

And needing to find out how many of those insects are around before it's a problem, and can we cure it?

And if we cut the top off of it, is it still there in the roots?

And so, all these kinds of cool questions that haven't been-- We had this pest kind of vanish and then resurge almost a century later.

Matt Digman is doing a lot of research and development, I guess, in the ag engineering space.

So, Juan Zalapa has his research beds of 3,000 different cranberry species.

Dr.

Digman and his group have invented a little robot that can drive over them and take pictures to take phenological measurements, to say, "What's the yield on this one?"

Or, "How fast did this one fill in its planting zone so that it's outcompeting weeds?"

Or, "Is this one coming out of dormancy earlier or later?

Are these fruits larger or smaller?"

So, great measurements to help with-- with everything that we're doing in the genetic space.

And then, many of the CALS faculty have a co-posting with UW Division of Extension.

And that's kind of, as I mentioned earlier, the CALS faculty are focused on research, but for the portion of their appointment that is Extension, that's talking directly to growers.

And so, part of my role as the Cranberry Outreach Specialist is connecting these CALS faculty and these USDA faculty with the growers.

I'm hosting annual research roundtables, where after the growing season, people will come together and say, "Here was my problem this year.

"Here's what I think we need to do in the next year or two.

"Here's what I think we need to do in the next 20 years.

Which of those problems are research-shaped?"

And then, all of the researchers can say, "Oh, that's a great one.

"I'm gonna go put in my grant that the growers really need this."

And they've heard directly from growers to see that they do need this, and so I'm very proud that the shape of cranberry research is really guided by what the growers themselves actually observed themselves needing.

And, yeah, I want to close with a few gorgeous cranberry harvest photos.

And, again, just extremely proud to be from Wisconsin, the, for the last-- Since 1995, the largest producer of cranberries in the United States and in the world, because of Wisconsin's climate, because of Wisconsin's culture, because of Wisconsin's innovation, because of the gifts that the glaciers gave us, and because of the gifts of all of the people who live here.

[audience applauds]