Cranberry Country -- Tiny Industry Sees The Fruit Of Its Labor Become Part Of Big Business

GRAYLAND, Grays Harbor County - At the heart of the annual cranberry harvest here is a piece of machinery called the Furford Picker Pruner, U.S. Patent No. 2915817.

It is about the size of a portable dishwasher. It is powered by a 5-horsepower engine bolted on top, looking like a toddler in the child's seat of a shopping cart. What matters most on the Furford Picker Pruner is underneath: Its 14 knives snip the cranberry vines, and 14 tines guide the berries to conveyor paddles. The berries land in a gunnysack hooked on back.

The Furford Picker Pruner, devised by an 85-year-old tinkerer, is somehow fitting for the state's cranberry industry.

"It's not like International Harvester is going to spend millions developing a harvester for such a tiny industry," said Chris Phillips, spokesman for Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc. Three-quarters of the world's 1,000 cranberry growers, including all 130 farmers in Washington state, belong to the Ocean Spray cooperative.

Unlike Washington state farmers, most of the nation's cranberry growers flood their bogs at harvest and collect the buoyant berries from the water's surface. And while corporate farms predominate in some cranberry regions, Washington state's industry is mom-and-pop. Virtually every bog is farmer-owned. The average farm is just 10 acres (444 acres is the state's average farm size). Most of the farmers are descendant from the Finns, Swedes and Norwegians who 70 years ago first planted vines they had imported from New England.

Despite their quaintness, the state's cranberry farms also are a component of a growing, nationwide food and beverage powerhouse. Ocean Spray blended aggressive marketing, imaginative product development and a new distribution agreement with Pepsi-Cola to push last year's sales past $1.4 billion. Sales are expected to increase again this year, despite a 10 percent drop in the nation's cranberry harvest. "Like it or not, SIZE is the name of the game today," reads the 1992 Ocean Spray annual report.

The Massachusetts-based cooperative also hopes to have millions of people one day munching Craisins, cranberries that have been dried then injected with sugar and juice. Most Ocean Spray products are sweetened. Outside the processing plant near Grayland are a dozen 12,000-gallon railroad tankers, each brimming with corn syrup.

"The cranberry is one of the worst-tasting commercial fruits when you eat it fresh," said Kim Patten, a horticulturist who manages the Washington State University extension unit at Long Beach. "But because of marketing genius, it's everywhere."

The growth continues despite a remarkably limited cranberry-growing range. The crop, harvested from just 30,000 acres, comes from British Columbia and five U.S. states: Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Prices have climbed steadily for years, and the Grayland farmers have three-year contracts with Ocean Spray, which agrees to buy 100 percent of their berries. In agribusiness, that is called "crop security." It is highly desirable.

Much less of all this would be possible, of course, without the Furford Picker Pruner, U.S. Patent No. 2915817.

Grayland growers

David Piukkula frequently looks down as he walks behind a Furford machine, as if he were pushing a frail hospital patient in a wheelchair. It is important to guide the machine in a straight line, because the cranberry vines in neighboring rows are trained to grow in opposite directions. Each row is no wider than the Furford's leading edge: 26 inches. The pattern looks like the grass tennis courts at Wimbledon. Except a cranberry bog at harvest time is ankle deep and is tinted dusty-rose.

David Piukkula's father, who has the same name, said his son has been working in the bogs for three years. Only now can he operate a picker with discretion. "It has taken him that long so where I feel comfortable not watching him all the time," said the elder Piukkula. Even careful harvesters leave about 10 percent of the crop on the ground.

Railroad tracks run nearby. The bog's sandy-peat soil is too soft to stand heavy-vehicle tires. The land, at $25,000 to $40,000 per cultivated acre, is also too valuable to cut roads through. So the farmers long ago laid light-gauge rails. They rig motors on flat-bed carts to pick up berry sacks and ferry equipment.

Even at that, they harvest the narrow space between the rails.

David Piukkula estimated he will harvest 160 to 170 barrels per acre off his 16-acre bog this year. A barrel equals 100 pounds. If Piukkula's prediction is accurate, he would harvest 256,000 pounds. At the going price of 54 cents a pound, Piukkula might gross $138,000 from his crop. Because part of the growers' payments from Ocean Spray come in the form of stock, however, Piukkula's gross revenues might be closer to $112,000. Subtract the industry average of $3,000 per acre for production costs (labor, fertilizers, irrigation), and his revenues may be more like $65,000.

Ocean Spray also pays incentives for color and quality. Farmers can earn as much as 18 cents more per pound if their berries are the favored bright red and will keep for up to three weeks.

Piukkula feels lucky to have what for him will be an average year. Overall, Washington state's crop is off about 15 percent. Crops in the nation's top-producing states - Massachusetts and Wisconsin - also are expected to drop. Too much rain fell last summer in the Midwest. Not enough fell in New England.

Like farmers everywhere, Grayland growers are full of theories about this year's crop. A cool, wet spring delayed the plants' transition from its wintertime dormancy. A sloppy June probably hampered the work of bees, which are trucked in annually for pollination.

Another theory holds that recent logging on the ridges east of town changed the air flows down into the bogs, relocating cold spots. Growers have electronic sensors that signal when temperatures in a bog drop below acceptable levels.

Weyerhaeuser, which owns 2,000 acres in the area, points out that logging and cranberry farming have long co-existed. Weyerhaeuser even has provided buffers of woods around the creeks that thread the ridge and drain into the bogs.

"It's hard for me to look at a cause-and-effect when we've had harvest activity there for 30 or 40 years," said Steve Barnowe-Meyer, land-use manager at the Weyerhaeuser regional office in Cosmopolis.

Ocean Spray

Bathed in the eye-shadow glow of ultraviolet lamps, Laura Enerson, Mary Dalrymple and Ruby Bennett examine quivering cranberries as they pass by on a conveyor belt.

Substandard berries, damaged by frost or by insects, will fluoresce under the ultraviolet light. They won't make the cut for 12-ounce packages for Thanksgiving Day. Ninety percent of the fresh crop is headed for Thanksgiving tables. Fresh berries, which make up 5 percent to 10 percent of the nation's harvest, are more profitable for Ocean Spray than those it crushes into juice, sauce or jelly.

The black-light room is at Ocean Spray's sprawling facility in Markham, a few miles east of Grayland. Markham will process all 1,400 acres of the state's cranberry crop, valued at more than $8 million. A bit more than half of the crop is from Grayland; the rest is from bogs near Long Beach.

Enerson, Dalrymple and Bennett are among the 100 harvest workers added for eight weeks to the factory's 170 full-time workers. The three women make about $8 an hour. In the black-light room, the berries are warmer to the touch than they are at earlier points in the screening process.

"But a lot of the girls don't like to work up here because they say the light and the motion together makes them ill," said Enerson.

Like other aspects of the cranberry industry, the Markham plant combines old methods with new technology.

The berries only make it to 11 conveyor belts in the Screening Room - where people called "screeners" sort the good from the bad - after passing through 11 Bailey mills made in 1923. Workers pour the berries into the top of the mills, where each berry has three chances to ricochet from ladder-like slats onto a conveyor belt. Berries firm enough to be sold fresh bounce promptly to the belt. Squishier berries drop straight through the mills, doomed to the anonymity of sauce, jelly or juice.

"We used to give each berry seven chances," said Bob Radford, the fresh-fruit manager at Markham, "but we found that if it doesn't make it in the first three times, it's probably not a good berry."

They've been doing it that way for 70 years.

Not far from the mills, however, stands a newer contraption, the TransWrap, which packages 108 12-ounce bags of fresh berries every minute. On the packaging floor, liquid jets fill bottles with juice blends heated to 195 degrees for sanitary reasons. In the color laboratory, a technician pours berries into a Waring blender,

purees for three minutes, mixes the test-sample juice with hydrochloric acid, then runs that mixture through a sprectrophotometer. It's to see how red the berries are.

The redder the red, the richer the farmer.

"We're in the business, fundamentally, of selling red drinks," Radford said.

This care, science and machinery grows in importance as Ocean Spray's marketing and distribution efforts increase.

The new distribution push is a 1-year-old agreement with Pepsi-Cola. Using Pepsi's 418 bottlers, 22,000 field salespeople and 18,000 trucks, Ocean Spray would like to increase the amount of juice it sells in 10-ounce bottles or 11.5 ounce cans. The cooperative wants to boost this "single-serve" share of its enterprise from 10 percent to 30 percent by the year 2000. Also by 2000, Ocean Spray aims to increase its overall sales to $2 billion.

It all started out so simply, 63 years ago. Advertisements from that era called Cranberry Juice Cocktail "The Tonic Food." In 1963, the company introduced Cran-Apple, which its promotional department called "the crazy mixed-up drink that's not quite apple. Not quite cranberry."

Today, the cooperative's juice products, which account for 80 percent of its revenues, remain not quite cranberry. And not quite anything else, in particular. There's Cran-Grape, Cran-Raspberry, Cran-Blueberry, Cran-Strawberry, Cranicot, Cranberry Juice Cocktail, Pink Grapefruit Juice Cocktail, 100% Grapefruit Juice, Citrus Peach, Citrus Cranberry, Crantastic Blended Juice Drink, Citrus Peach Refresher and Mauna Lai Citrus Fruit Drinks.

U.S. Patent No. 2915817

The 120-foot-long walls of Julius Furford's shop, patched neatly with panels of corrugated metal, are the color of the salty foam rolling up on the beach a few hundred yards away.

Inside his shop, it is all shadows and things that look like shadows, such as long lengths of aluminum stock. The cavernous building has the good-clean-workshop smells of oil and wet-broomed cement. Silvery dust churns the air above a industrial saw where a man is cutting notches in an aluminum plate. It is Julius Furford, 85.

Milky wisps of hair curl like metal filings from underneath his worn baseball cap. The khaki of his coveralls is broken only by the pink eraser tip of a No. 2 pencil and by the glint of a six-inch metal ruler, which poke from a breast pocket.

"I figured, well, why not make a picker and a pruner at the same time?" said Julius Furford. "That was in the '40s."

Furford is explaining how he came to invent the Furford Picker Pruner, U.S. Patent No. 2915817. The son of Norwegians and born in Minnesota, Furford first witnessed the ergonomically incorrect cranberry harvest in the 1930s. Pickers hunched over the rows with wooden scoops with long teeth that dislodged the berries. Later came vacuum pickers. But they were cumbersome and roared like airplanes. Even when the Western mechanical picker was developed, it could only pick. Farmers still had to prune the plants, vine by vine.

Furford worked eight years to perfect his picker pruner. He sold his first machines for $1,200. He since has sold 450. Half remain in the state, most in Grayland, but half are used by dry harvesters in Massachusetts. His new models sell for $6,500.

Julius Furford is not retired. He must sit after every few steps because of arthritic back pain, but he is now building an industrial brush cutter. He imagines them in use on highway medians and shoulders.

"When I retire," he said, "you'll know I'm sick."

Behind Furford's shop is the Cranberry Museum and Sellers Mall, a rambling reliquary of the local cranberry culture. Here is the original 1957 Furford Picker Pruner. On a shelf sits a line of old cranberry crates, with "Mist-Kist" stamped in blue ink on each end. A harvesting scoop, with its 10-inch yew teeth, is also here.

Someone has painted an oil portrait of Julius Furford, to commemorate the museum's opening some years back. Why is it leaning on a chair, and not hung properly, perhaps near the entrance? To Furford, the question does not seem to matter.

"When I die, I'm going to leave a mark," he said. "I've accomplished something."

In 1990, Ocean Spray announced a nationwide competition to improve on the Furford Picker Pruner, U.S. Patent No. 2915817.

The prize was $250,000.

Ocean Spray extended the contest three years.

No one has ever collected.