Town Bog To Get Boost From Hybrid Vines

     Looking out over the sand-covered cranberry bog along Route 6A, just east of the Green Briar Nature Center, owner of Beaton Cranberries Douglas R. Beaton calls the property, “the East Sandwich Sahara.” 
     For more than 140 years, the 6.5-acre cranberry bog has been producing the tangy red fruit that has come to be a trademark of Cape Cod. But, this fall, not a single berry will be picked from that bog.
     The farm is out of commission for this year, awaiting the installation of some 163 sprinkler heads and a new dike system. Once that work is done, new vines will be poked into every square foot of the bog and the hope is that the new vines will produce three times more berries than the old vines.
     “That’s the plan,” said Mr. Beaton, who lives on nearby Discovery Hill Road.
     He explained that the former variety of vines, called Early Black, were smaller and produced only about 120 barrels of cranberries per acre. The new variety of vines he is planting is much bigger and is expected to produce as much as 450 barrels of berries per acre. The work to upgrade this bog began three weeks ago, with the removal of the old vines, which Mr. Beaton said were taken away for recycling. He said they will most likely be made into mulch.
     “If I just left the vines alone and didn’t replace them, eventually it would no longer be economically feasible to grow the cranberries and the land would return to the maple swamp it once was. I had a lot of angst over replacing the vines,” Mr. Beaton said. 
     He pointed out, however, that this bog is an important part of Sandwich and its history.  He said the vines date back to somewhere around 1860. 
     “This bog is as much a part of Sandwich as the [Dexter] Grist Mill,” he said.
     Called Demoranbille, the new variety of vines come from Rutgers University in New Jersey and are part of a program, sponsored by Ocean Spray, to develop a hybrid of cranberry vines that would produce more berries than traditional ones. This project, Mr. Beaton said, has been going on for 20 years.
     Replanting this bog represented a significant investment on the part of Mr. Beaton, a fifth-generation cranberry grower. 
     Besides the 7,000 yards of new sand that has been brought in that will serve as the soil for the new vines and upgrades to the irrigation system and the dike system, he will be losing an entire season’s worth of growing. 
     “It’s costing us $35,000 to $40,000 per acre,” he said. 
     Beyond that, he said, because the vines are patented, he will have to pay a royalty fee to Rutgers University. The vines are only sold to licensed cranberry growers. 
     Mr. Beaton said the demand for cranberries has grown over the past six or seven years and, as a farmer and businessman, he is trying to meet that demand. He is also replanting some of the other bogs that he owns in Plymouth County. In total, Beaton’s Cranberries owns 1,000 acres of cranberry farms. 
     “This is just a small part of the entire farm,” he said referring to the Sandwich property he purchased in 1972.
     Like him, other cranberry farmers are planting this improved variety of vine to take advantage of the new—and very welcomed—increases in demand for the berries.
     “Six or seven years ago, we couldn’t give cranberries away. The price dropped from $60 a barrel to $11 a barrel,” he said.
     But rather than do nothing about such a drop in price, he said he and other cranberry growers decided to take action. “We stopped feeling sorry for ourselves and began an advertising campaign. We started selling cranberries overseas and now 27 percent of the cranberries produced are sold abroad,” he said.
     That advertising campaign, along with new juice and food products that contain processed cranberries, has caused the price to rebound back to near record highs and the berries are now selling for $52 per barrel. Mr. Beaton pointed out that cranberries are an especially healthy fruit. 
     “They’re loaded with antioxidants,” he said.
     Even though no berries will be picked this year, Mr. Beaton said the bog will still be flooded over this winter to prevent winter kill, caused by cold temperatures and harsh winter winds. Flooding the bogs actually protects the vines. He expects to flood the land some time in January. 
     “It will be a little tricky to get it covered with ice. If ice gets into the vines, it can lift them right out of the soil. We’ll have to be very cautious,” he said.
     Mr. Beaton has been working cranberry farms since he was 4 years old. 
     “My grandfather took me out and had me weeding the farms. I hated it,” he said. He decided at that young age that he would never go into the family business and, instead, would go to college. And he did. He attended the University of Rhode Island, where he earned a degree in agricultural business. His son Matthew W. Beaton works in the business and his daughter Ashley C. Beaton, who will be a freshman at Wentworth Institute of Technology in September, works at the University of Massachusetts Cranberry Experiment Station in Wareham.