December 21, 2022

My life in cranberry world

My life in cranberry world

By Hal Brown
Updated Jan. 13, 2023

Betty and Hal and Stoyan harvesting berries

Cranberry Stressline 

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So, if you've been wondering about my connection to cranberries - besides having grown them for 25 years....

Introduction - How it all began.


My wife Betty and I had been living in Mason, a rural town in Michigan, since we were in graduate school.. Betty was working on her PhD in English and I was in the MSW  program at Michigan State. We both enjoyed out jobs until one thing led to another and our work was no longer fun. This is irrelevant to the story but it is why when Betty’s parents told us they were retiring and planning to sell their cranberry farm (or bogs as those in the industry call cranberry farms) we were ready to make a huge life change.


We decided to move to Massachusetts and buy the bogs along with her three cousins who bought them from their father, Betty;s father’s brother who was half owner.


Betty only knew about how to grow cranberries from being on the bogs all the time when she was growing.up and from our visiting during harvest season. She was an incredibly quick learner with her father being an excellent teacher.


At the time there were only two women active in the political side of the cranberry industry. We’d become good friends with Paul, now diseased, and Linda Rinta who had bogs in the next town. Linda, who recent won this prestigious award) and Betty really hit it off and Linda became Betty’s mentor in the political side of the industry. 

Linda Pinto today


It was because of Linda that Betty ended up on the advisory council of Ocean Spray (about the co-op), the grower owned co-op we and most growers belonged to. 


She also was elected to be on the board of the Cape Cod Canberry Growers’ Association and the Plymouth County Conservation District.


This was all in addition to working as a full-time reference librarian at the local library. I had a small private practice.


Betty ran the bog and because I was mechanically inept we hired Tim DeMoranvile to be our bog manager and he ran the day-to-day operation.

 

Except for periodic conflicts with Betty’s cousins, only one of whom was himself a cranberry grower, over business decisions things wanting smoothly for several years. We had good yields and the price per barrel assured a tidy profit.


Then disaster hit. It was called a “bttter harvest” in a New York Times article which feature an inter view with Betty.


I am getting ahead of myself.


By the time newspaper reporters were traveling from New York City to interview Betty we saw a looming disaster. Ocean Spray was counting on white cranberry juice to increase demand significantly and directed their growers to plant more and more cranberry vines. New vines take three years to be ready to harvest. By the time they were ready white cranberry juice had failed to sell. Thus the supply far outweighed the demand and prices crashed. This forced many small and medium sized grower like us to have to sell our bogs to larger growers.


I am still ahead of myself.


Prior to this Ocean Spray was controlled by giant growers in Wisconsin where empty farm land had been converted to cranberry bogs. In the other cranberry growing state, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oregon most bogs had to conform to the land or large hills had to be excavated to make new bogs.


Many growers were like us and saw that Ocean Spray not only made a bad decision with white cranberry juice but was making numerous other bad management decisions. Betty and I decided to make a website and forum which we called Cranberry Stressline where we would expose these bad decisions and enable growers from all the regions who only knew each other form attending annual meetings to communicated with each other.


In those days there was no Google but because Betty has a Lexus-Nexus account though the university where she taught a library course we had access to information not readily available.


We found many instances where management was wasting money, our money, and exposed this.


The end result, attributed to a large degree to Cranberry Stressline’s expose and the communication it fostered, the CEO, Robert Hawthorne, was fired and the entire Ocean Spray Board of Directors was replaced.


The rest of the story

Even before the cranberry industry collapsed and began making the news, my late wife Betty had been selected by Ocean Spray as a spokeswoman. She had a two page profile in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (a full page picture below no less), and did a segment for the Sunday Today Show and another for New England Chronicle and Rebecca's Garden (which you can view on the blog). In fact the later TV piece was still being aired around Thanksgiving eight years later. 

Boston Globe Sunday Magazine profile
Click to enlarge to read text




















At first I did an us-and-the-media webpage just to send to our friends and family.  

I kept it up, neglecting to link to a few articles here and there when I lost interest from time to time, mainly to document for myself our weird life here, so different from the decades we spent in Michigan where I was a psychotherapist and Betty was a librarian.

Nothing much happened between November of 1996 and April of 1999 in the cranberry industry.  But then one thing led to another little world of Ocean Spray and cranberries, cranberry prices crashed, and it became apparent that Ocean Spray's mismanagement  had been largely responsible for this. Before I knew what hit, Cranberry Stressline went from being about plain old farm stress, to being political and controversial. First the website was covered in the local media, then the reporters started calling from around the country, including the New York Times and Forbes.   Both sent reporters to interview us.

Along with a long article, Betty was pictured on the front page of the Sunday business section of the New York Times with the Ocean Spray CEO.
Click above to read, subscription required

Excerpts:

The long article begins:

Cranberries have been good to Betty Brown's family for generations. Her grandfather staked out cranberry bogs here on the sandy shoulder of Cape Cod in the 1930's, and now Mrs. Brown and three of her cousins farm the land they are in the process of buying from their parents.

And the family has been good to Ocean Spray, the 69-year-old company that dominates the cranberry business and sold about $1.4 billion of cranberry drinks and other products last year. Mrs. Brown even had her photograph featured in last year's Ocean Spray annual report.

But lately the relationship has soured, and Mrs. Brown has become one of the company's most vocal critics.

''One of the hardest things we had to do was look the two dads in the eye and say, we can't pay you this year,'' she said.

They cannot pay because Ocean Spray, besieged by crises ranging from an oversupply of cranberries to increased competition to some costly marketing mistakes, has sharply cut the price it pays farmers for the fruit. The situation has become so dire that management has commissioned a total review of its operations, hiring Bain & Company and Merrill Lynch & Company as its consultants.






Is it a dream I asked? Pinch me. Is it real? Are we really farmers that created something called by the shorthand "Stressline" that just about everybody involved in the entire beverage industry knew about and read?  Connie Hayes, the New York Times reporter who wrote the above article which appeared with Betty's photo on the front page of the Sunday business section came to visit us. 

I was shocked to learn in writing this that she died at the age of 44 in 2005. She was the author of "The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company".Read NYT story (subscription).

Another reporter, I forget her name, came to interview us for an article in Forbes. The Boston Globe photographer spent the better part of a day in our backyard bog taking a photo of Betty sitting on a wooden cranberry crate.

Of necessity, to promote our cause, we became Shameless Media Hogs.

Betty has passed away on Jan. 11, 2011.
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P.S. We, meaning a large group of small and medium size grower-members, of the Ocean Spray Co-Op won. The giant growers, most from Wisconsin, were stripped of the power they'd have for many years. The CEO was fired and the entire Board of Directors was replaced.

Below: Cranberry bog photos, click to enlarge:


Tim DeMoranville our bog foreman

Our vintage picking rig which we replaced soon after buying the bogs.






Tim DeMoranville

















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