Subtitles section Play video
-
Come Thanksgiving, cranberries hit tables across the US.
-
Usually in sauce form.
-
But these pink super fruits have a long journey before they ever make it to your holiday plate.
-
Odds are your cranberries started here in New England, on an Ocean Spray farm.
-
Hi, I'm Alison Carr and I am a 6th generation cranberry farmer here in Massachusetts, and you are on my family farm.
-
Headquartered in Lakeville, Massachusetts, Ocean Spray harvests 220 billion cranberries a year.
-
Cranberries are primarily harvested in the water.
-
Despite what people think, they don't grow in water all year.
-
Cranberries begin as vines in wetland fields called a bog.
-
In June, small pink flowers bloom.
-
It's said the flowers look like a crane, giving the berry its name.
-
Around late June the flowers fall off, and the actual cranberry starts to grow.
-
Harvesting happens between September and October, when the bogs are filled with a couple inches of water.
-
A berry-picking machine drives into the bog, and churns up the vines to knock the berries off.
-
Because cranberries have four air pockets inside, they float to the surface of the water.
-
We try to use Mother Nature as much as we can, and the wind.
-
And in a lot of cases, the cranberries will be pushed to one area of the bog and that's the area that we use to take the cranberries off.
-
A couple more inches of water are added to the bog.
-
And this is where you've probably seen images of farmers thigh-deep in cranberry water.
-
Dressed in waders, farmers maneuver what's called a boom to corral the berries into one corner of the bog.
-
They then rake all the berries into vacuums that suck them up into the backs of trucks.
-
The trucks are sent off to the Ocean Spray processing plants where they're unloaded.
-
Those berries can become one of 1,000 different products.
-
Ranging from juices, to dried cranberries, to of course, cranberry sauce.
-
Each year, Ocean Spray facilities produce about 88 million cans of cranberry sauce, and 223 million bottles of juice!
-
Their products are sold in stores across a hundred different countries.
-
But how do small, family-owned farms in Massachusetts help produce almost 65% of all cranberries sold?
-
That's because they're a part of the Ocean Spray agricultural cooperative.
-
Started in 1933, today 700 family farms across the US, Canada and Chile, collectively own the Ocean Spray brand.
-
The average farm in the cooperative is just 18 acres.
-
These are small family farms, typically multi-generations.
-
In fact more than a quarter of our farms are in their fourth generation or greater.
-
Under the cooperative, the family farms see 100% of the profits from Ocean Spray product sales.
-
Cooperatives support farmers because ultimately farmers are able to capture a lot more value for their crops.
-
So the value we add through manufacturing and marketing and that blue Ocean Spray brand,
-
all of that went back to the farm rather than going to a middle-man or a CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) company.
-
So you can go back to your cranberry-sauce-turkey-dunking, knowing you've supported a co-op six generations in the making.