HEATH — As blueberry farmers from across Franklin County are harvesting their crops, two lowbush blueberry farms in Heath are citing significant reductions in their yields.
Both The Benson Place and its neighboring Burnt Hill Blueberry Farm are reporting challenging yields this summer, but are citing opposite reasons. Benson Place owner and manager Meredith Wecker pointed to weeks of hot, dry climate to being behind her 50% yield reduction, while Burnt Hill owner Sonny Nartowicz said excessive spring rain was responsible for killing roughly 40% of his blueberry crop.
“We didn’t do as well as we did last year, but it wasn’t due to the heat. Our problem was back in May — we had so much rain and cold weather that we had real poor pollination,” Nartowicz said. “We have a two-week window in May that we need good weather for pollination and then we have a two-week window, usually in late July, that we need good weather for harvest. If we don’t get that good weather in those two weeks in May and in July, it’s tough.”
The blueberry bushes also suffered minor burn damage in the summer months from too much sun, Nartowicz said, though this was not enough to affect yields.
Nartowicz explained while this summer’s crop showed loss, last summer’s fields were healthy. This was not the case for The Benson Place, which has been hit with back-to-back losses for the last three years, according to Wecker.
The Benson Place, Wecker said, saw a diminished crop last year, which had already been damaged from a severe drought in 2022. She explained that when blueberry bushes die back — referring to the bushes receding as they die — their roots take a particularly long time to regrow, and grass and weeds can take over.
“We had a drought three years ago in the middle of the summer and we had a lot of blueberry bushes die back. We’d never seen anything like it before. The leaves literally just shriveled and fell off the plant,” Wecker said. “Normally, the plants don’t lose their leaves until October, but the leaves just fell off. … The next two years were really wet, and in the places where the plants had died back, the grass just took over.”
As The Benson Place is organic and does not use herbicide sprays, the farm has had a difficult time mitigating weed growth, Wecker said. In an effort to roll back the losses, she said the farm has applied for grants through the American Farmland Trust to secure some pine mulch in hopes of retaining moisture in the blueberry fields.
Although the farm’s yield took a hit, Wecker explained that the dry, hot temperatures gave this year’s blueberries a more concentrated flavor.
“The berries are tasting really good, which is awesome,” she said. “On a wet year, they get kind of waterlogged and diluted, but we’ve been really happy with the quality this year.”
Lisa Goodrich, communications coordinator for the South Deerfield-based Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), wrote in a Greenfield Recorder column that farms such as Sobieski’s River Valley Farm in Whately have faced challenging weather conditions over the last decade, making it difficult for farms to grow “a healthy crop of blueberries.”
“It used to be that the cold in spring gave me time to prune,” said Robert Sobieski, the current owner/operator of the River Road farm that has been tending to highbush blueberry bushes since 1977. “When we get an early spring that heats up, it rushes everything. This year is more what I remember — the cool weather kept the bushes dormant until mid-April.”
In May 2023, a late freeze took out a large portion of River Valley Farm’s crop. Since then, the farm invested in infrastructure to mitigate weather extremes. The farm now has a wind machine to manage temperatures to protect the bushes from late frosts, and an overhead irrigation system to protect from frost or freeze by misting the early buds, forming a protective coating around the bud when temperatures plummet. The irrigation system also works for water management during the growing season, or to protect the plants from damaging heat when the temperatures surge.
Both The Benson Place and Burnt Hill grow a lowbush blueberry variety, which Wecker said are more difficult to irrigate. Kurt Wilkins, a co-owner of Kenburn Orchards in Shelburne, said that his highbush blueberry plants have grown very successfully this year, noting that the orchard has more blueberries than he and his family can pick.
“This year’s been kind of a bumper crop, from what we’ve heard from returning guests,” Wilkins said. “There’s more blueberries right now than we can deal with. … It’s been a huge year for the crop.”
