For Grayland Farmers, Cranberries Are A Way Of Life -- Close-Knit Community Focuses On Colorful Crop

GRAYLAND, Grays Harbor County - Here in the Southwestern corner of the state, the land levels out, and the Pacific silvers morning sunlight with mist blowing in from the surf.

The trees thin until the view clears, giving way to low, flat cranberry bogs stitched with drainage ditches. The streets have names like Cranberry Beach and Cranberry Road.

This low-lying strip of land stretching from Grayland to the Long Beach Peninsula is home to nearly all the state's cranberry growers. They are a close-knit clan of about 120 whose livelihood is as much art as craft.

Cranberry growing is a quiet subculture within Washington's swaggering fruit industry. Big-bucks orchardists are major players in the world market. When it comes to apples, sweet cherries and pears, nobody is bigger than Washington.

But the state's cranberry crop makes up just about 4 percent of the national harvest. Cranberry farming remains a world of small family farms and hand-made tools.

"It's a way of life," said David Cottrell of Grayland, a third-generation grower who farms a peat bog just inland from the Pacific. "The ocean is right out there, and you can hear the surf. We get the first breath, the freshest air.

"It's also a unique way of farming here in the peat bogs in the swamp. The skills are something we grew up with. An awful lot of the neighbors here are people you knew growing up and your parents knew. There's something about that sense of community."

The cranberry harvest is estimated at about 160,000 barrels this year, down about 12 percent from last year because of cold weather and rain. But demand for cranberries remains high, so prices should be good and growers once again will sell all their crops.

Most of the state's growers are part of the Ocean Spray growers' cooperative, which processes and markets their crops and cuts their checks. This year's crop is estimated to be worth about $9.5 million.

The farm-implement and agricultural chemical companies don't bother much with such a small industry. And that contributes to another piece of the magic of cranberry farming.

Growers make most of their own tools and equipment themselves. They improvise and invent, cannibalizing everything from old cars to railroad equipment for parts.

Machinery used to strip berries from the low-lying, ruby-fruited vines is often made by hand and passed down through generations.

Chris Johnson of Grayland works a 14-acre place that's been in his family since the 1930s. Cranberries are a perennial, and Johnson works many of the same vines his father did. A weather-beaten house by the side of the road serves as his warehouse, where wooden machinery, made by his mother, still bears the pencil marks she scrawled on the wood to mark the cuts of her saw.

Johnson built a narrow-gauge railroad track that cuts straight through his bog and is used to trundle a venerable, scabrous farm cart up and down the field. His picker is a hand-made rig devised by Julius Furford, one of Grayland's local heroes.

Furford's machine shop smells of grease and damp concrete and is scattered with notebooks full of sketches for inventions - Pacific County's own Codex Leicester.

Furford, 89, said he got the idea for the picker while pruning his own berries in a driving rain. A machine that picked and pruned at the same time seemed smart, so he came up with the lawnmower-like device used by growers on both coasts.

Other inventions in the works include an all-terrain wheelchair and an oyster picker. An oil skimmer that didn't quite work out is docked in the middle of the floor.

Noodling in the shop is part of life in cranberry country.

"It gives you something to do on long winter evenings," Cottrell said. "And it's nice not having a half-million dollar combine with a major bank loan on it."

There are other advantages to this damp and quiet trade: Cranberry farmers need less land than other growers. About 10 or 11 acres is enough to feed a family and send the kids to college, said Rob Hitt, a third-generation grower in Grayland.

"I have a friend with a 4,000-acre wheat farm who makes as much money as I do," Hitt said.

Cranberries are one of the country's three native fruits, the others being blueberries and Concord grapes. They are well-suited to the climate of Southwestern Washington, but most of the cranberries in this country are grown in Massachusetts and Wisconsin.

Last year, cranberries were the fourth most valuable crop per harvested acre, behind onions, sweet cherries and carrots.

Johnson calls cranberries a forgiving crop. Even the more laborious jobs on a cranberry farm, such as refurbishing a tired bog, consist of chucking the prunings from more productive vines in a heap outside and keeping them wet through the winter - not difficult in this land of sou'westers.

Come spring, Johnson will scrape up the bogs he wants to renew with an excavator and plow the new vines under to sprout on their own. And many bogs require no replanting.

Picking is done with Furford's walk-behind machine. The berries are gathered in combine-like teeth. They rattle up a conveyor belt and fall into a burlap bag. The sacks, bulging with berries, are slung in the field, loaded onto a farm cart and railroaded back to the warehouse.

The berries are loaded into big wooden crates called totes. A truck comes by the farms about twice a week to haul the totes to the Ocean Spray cannery down the road.

Other growers in Long Beach harvest their crops by diking and flooding their fields then letting the wind blow the floating berries to one side. Or they scoop them up using a rake or a boom.

"So easy it ought to be illegal," Johnson said, shaking his head.

Many of the growers live next door to each other, with their fields separated by drainage ditches they dam in summer for irrigation. Their homes often bear their identification numbers within the Ocean Spray cooperative.

With about 800 growers across the country, Ocean Spray is one of the world's largest cooperatives. It markets about 70 percent of all cranberries grown in this country.

The co-op's marketing campaign has been aggressive, including a two-page full color spread in this week's New Yorker magazine, pitching the company's new slogan, "Refreshingly honest."

The $50 million campaign, timed for the end of the harvest, targets a health-conscious niche of consumers with its pitch: "Maybe we're bucking a trend here. But it just seems like a drink should have more nutritional value than the paper cup it's served in."

The largest percentage of each year's cranberry crop is juiced.

But the best berries are sold fresh in grocery stores now through winter in one-pound plastic bags. The rest of the crop is made into canned cranberry sauce.

At an Ocean Spray processing plant in Markham, the quiet world of hand-made tools fades quickly.

There berries are poured into a giant stainless steel hopper and fed through four bouncing boards to determine whether the berries have what it takes to be sold as fresh fruit.

A good cranberry will bounce, and each berry gets four chances on the bounceboard to show its stuff. No bounce, and the berry is sentenced to the juice plant.

Berries that pass the bounce test are scanned for color by a computer and checked by hand and under ultraviolet light for blemishes.

The final stop is a bagging machine that churns out 216 bags of berries a minute, eight hours a day. The bittersweet perfume of cranberries fills the air as the machinery blares.

Seasonal workers paid $7 to $8 an hour sort the berries, run the bagger, make up cardboard boxes and sweep up the crimson berries that jump the conveyor belt.

Hard times hit this month, when the company closed down juice-making operations at the Markham plant, eliminating 160 full-time jobs.

But in Southwestern Washington, where the historic economic mainstays of timber and fishing are troubled industries, Hitt and other growers say cranberries still provide a stable living for a lucky few.

"Down here cranberries are one of the bright spots," he said.

Lynda V. Mapes' phone message number is 206-464-2736. Her e-mail address is: lmap-new@seatimes.com