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Too much of a good thing

Cranberry growers have handed down farms, techniques, and tools for generations. But bumper crops and plummeting prices may signal the end is near.

If Massachusetts has a royal cranberry family, crowned heads of the state's biggest agricultural crop, that distinction belongs to the descendants of Abel Denison Makepeace, who was born in Middleborough in 1832.

Makepeace, a relative of the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, was a farmer, businessman, and inventor whose lasting legacy is a cranberry empire. He was the first to cultivate cranberries on a large scale, and in 1888 he founded the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers' Association, the first forum for sharing cranberry information and ideas. A.D.'s energetic son, John C. Makepeace, in his day grew more cranberries than anyone in the world. In 1930, with Marcus Urann and Elizabeth Lee, he founded the Ocean Spray Cranberry Co. (then called Cranberry Canners), a growers' cooperative that has dominated the cranberry world ever since. Today, John's grandson, Christopher, heads the family firm, which is based in Wareham. With 12,000 acres in bogs and upland areas, he is the largest cranberry grower and one of the largest private landowners in Massachusetts. His company, A. D. Makepeace, offers the priciest public stock in the state, at $11,600 a share. He is the best candidate for cranberry baron - or, as he calls himself, with his Massachusetts accent, "cranmeistah."

With assets on this scale, Makepeace, 52, might be expected to live a grand, or at least mildly exalted, lifestyle. In fact, his office is a modest cubicle - not even a corner suite - sandwiched between other small offices in a simple, farm-style house with dark gray shingles and a cranberry-colored door. No mahogany desk, no bay window. He drives a 1996 dark-green Ford pickup, lives in a three-bedroom home in woods nearby with his 43-year-old wife, Sue. She works as a clerk in a gift shop. "My family," he declares proudly, "has never flaunted its wealth."

As perhaps befits the kingpin of an industry devoted to a small, sour orb, Makepeace is one of the state's most unassuming business leaders. He's a shy man, with a neatly clipped salt-and-pepper beard, short white hair, and small blue eyes that seem locked in a state of apprehension. At the offices of the Ocean Spray cooperative, where he is the largest shareholder, staff say they sometimes mistake him for the gardener.

A psychology major in college, Makepeace describes himself as an "inside-outside guy" - one who thinks he can see into people, and read events and phenomena. He also likes being outdoors. "I'm not one to be planted behind a desk," he says. Indoors or out, though, the future he sees for the family business looks ominous. Cranberry growing, he says, "is dying on the vines."

With a huge surplus of berries in the nation's pantry, the price of cranberries is sinking to an all-time low. To save money, Makepeace has eliminated ditch clearing and hand weeding on his bogs, cut down on fertilizer and pesticides, and taken 300 acres out of production entirely - and won't even harvest whatever grows there naturally this year. But cranberry cycles, good and bad, tend to be prolonged, he says. More drastic measures are required to ensure solvency.

So, in a stunning move, he has put a private planning team on a fast track, working with state and local authorities to create a master plan with zoning changes that would allow him to develop about 9,500 acres - nearly 80 percent of his unplanted holdings - into residential and office tracts, as well as recreation areas, with some land preserved as open space. And he is selling 45 more acres for house lots. Soon this man born with cranberry juice in his blood, the reigning potentate of cranberrydom, will be a baron of business tracts, condominiums, and golf courses. Cranberries could be just a tart aftertaste.

Makepeace stresses that this development may take 20 or 30 years and is not a knee-jerk reaction to the current crisis. He hopes he can continue to keep most of his cranberry bogs in operation. "But this is the worst modern cranberry catastrophe since 1930," he says. "I know some growers who aren't even growing a crop this year. It's not worth it to them. It's painful for all the growers. They've invested wisely, built their farms. Now the losses are so severe that they're seeing their lives passing in front of them. The majority of growers have to be realistic and contemplate a future that isn't in cranberries."

The crisis hit with a speed that has sent growers reeling. Until the last few years, cranberries looked like red gold. In 1996, they sold for $70 to $85 a barrel, the farmer's equivalent of 100 pounds. That was when Wisconsin growers, eager to get in on a good thing, began cultivating cranberries in vast tracts of land with high-yield hybrid berries and an efficiency most Massachusetts farmers never knew. Before long, Wisconsin farmers were producing 228 barrels of berries per acre, compared with 127 barrels per acre in Massachusetts. Now the industry has a surplus so large it can meet most of the nation's cranberry needs without harvesting a single additional berry. And a bumper crop is expected this fall.

The glut means prices are plummeting. Last year, a barrel brought barely $16. Hoping to stabilize the industry, the US secretary of agriculture on July 10 called for a 15 percent reduction in the amount of cranberries each grower can bring to market - excepting only organic cranberries and those sold fresh and whole, for which there is no surplus but which account for less than 10 percent of the market. Still, this fall, the price is expected to bottom out at $8 to $11 a barrel.

Officials hope for an upturn to at least $20 a barrel by 2002, but that's little comfort to most Massachusetts growers, who say they need about $35 a barrel to break even. The crisis is so severe that a mental health specialist in Plymouth County has started Cranberrystressline.com, a Web site featuring industry news and advice about how farmers and their families can cope with depression, anxiety, and self-esteem issues.

You can see the reach of the problems in the southeastern Massachusetts town of Carver, the epicenter of the cranberry quake. With 3,418 acres of cranberries, Carver has nearly 25 percent of the state's bogs and 10 percent of all the cranberry terrain in the nation. There's a Cranberry Chapel, Cranberry Dental Associates, a mobile home park named Cranberry Village, Cranberry Convenience, Cranberry Book Barn, Cranberry Junction Hobbies, and Cranberry Day Care Center. Bogs decorate the town like sunken swaths of green, cut by dikes and ditches in irregular patterns, as if shaped by an array of giant cookie cutters.

For this year's Old Home Day, July 29, hundreds of Carver residents gathered on a piney lot across from Town Hall for a feast of clams, corn on the cob, potatoes, and sausages, cooked by hot rocks under seaweed and corn husks. Among the throng was Clark Griffith, 68. His great-grandfather started a foundry business in Carver on the day after the Civil War ended, mining iron that settled in lowland kettle ponds. Once the ore was extracted, he discovered that cranberries could thrive in the abandoned mines and began growing them commercially.

Griffith has been farming cranberries most of his life, on 80 acres of bogs. "I've been through four down periods, but this is the worst," he said as the Bridgewater Antiphonal Brass Society band boomed in the background, not entirely on key. "All the growers are very blue."

Carver's town seal shows an old iron foundry surrounded by cranberries on vines that entwine above like heavenly script. But with the downward spiral in cranberry prices since 1996, most of the shops in Carver Square remain empty. Last year, several businesses closed or cut back services. At least eight parcels of former cranberry land are up for sale as house lots. Another bog will soon be an 18-hole golf course.

Declining cranberry prices have led to lower state valuation of cranberry bogs - from an average of $17,600 per acre last year to $9,611 this year. Town Administrator Rick LaFond says the resulting $312,000 drop in town revenue will necessitate an average tax increase of $80 per parcel of land. Other cranberry towns, such as Wareham (it has 1,628 acres of bogs) and Middleborough (1,444 acres), are also shifting their tax burdens. Their single-family homeowners will pay higher taxes this year to compensate for the cranberry crash. And as cranberry workers get second jobs, officials worry that the ranks of volunteer fire departments will be depleted - a greater threat to town security than the tax problem, LaFond says.

But cranberries, after all, are much more than a cash crop. The crisis is sprouting its own set of cultural changes, as cranberry growers - who never have had federal crop subsidies or price supports - find new ways to fend for themselves. Many are taking additional jobs. Some are opening their farms to the public, offering pick-your-own berry operations, bed and breakfasts, and other forms of agri-tourism. Some, like Makepeace, are selling or developing their land, particularly upland areas that have provided protective buffer zones for the bogs.

But identity issues are heavy as individuals and entire families reconceive their roles in the world. And as woodlands go to house lots and minimalls, many worry that thousands of acres that have served as de facto parks and wildlife refuges will be transformed. Massachusetts will lose some of its last patches of wildness and, with them, a cherished, quirky, little-known bit of its heritage.

The cranberry is a sour little sphere, tart and saucy. Faintly pink in summer, it flares in the fall to scarlet, rose, and hues as dark as blood. Pop a handful of the bitter berries into your mouth, and you'd never dream they could be the basis of a billion-dollar industry, the official state beverage of Massachusetts, and its largest cash crop.

Even birds won't eat them. Only certain pests, like the Sparganothis fruit worm, and certain people, provided the cranberries are laced with sugar, enjoy their mouth-puckering flavor. But if any fruit can be called typically American, it must be this hearty, buoyant, assertive red berry. One of only three fruits native to the United States (the others are the blueberry and the Concord grape), it was served at the first Thanksgiving, and it has never quite lost a taste that says "independence."

"The cranberry submits to cultivation," wrote author Cornelius Weygandt in 1940, "but it retains that savour of wildness that is its birthright. There are little things as well as great that cannot be tamed, cranberries . . . as well as winds and waters."

A member of the large, diverse heath family, which includes huckleberries, lingonberries, and more, the cranberry has always resisted easy classification. Some scientists put it in the genus Oxycoccus (oxys, meaning acidic; coccum, red berry) for its taste and color. Others assign it to Vaccinium (meaning "of cows"), because it was sometimes mistaken for the cowberry, or mountain cranberry. Although cranberries grow in other countries, those species are smaller, less juicy, and more sour. The American variety, usually dubbed Vaccinium macrocarpon (macro, large; carpus, fruit), is the only one grown commercially. Americans consume 90 percent of the world's cranberries; 20 percent of these are eaten at Thanksgiving.

The cranberry is neither bush nor tree but a slender, wiry vine with low-lying runners 2 to 6 feet long, small leathery leaves, and short upright branches, just 2 or 3 inches high, on which the fruit grows. These odd proportions give the plants a strange, somewhat stunted appearance. Early settlers found them on Cape Cod, hugging the borders of streams and ponds, nestling in the crooks of sand dunes, or proliferating in patches of marsh and glaciated sinkholes. They grew wild throughout southeastern Massachusetts as well as in the New Jersey pine barrens, in isolated areas from the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania to the peat swamps of Virginia, and in wetlands of Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Native Americans dried them and mixed them with venison and melted fat to make small, portable trail cakes called pemmican - arguably the country's first convenience food, an early granola bar. They also used the berries to dye clothing and blankets and for a poultice so astringent it could draw infection from wounds.

Despite their blood-red color, cranberries were considered symbols of harmony and peace. Some Native American religious leaders were known as Pakimintzen, or "Cranberry Eaters," who served the berries to consummate peace pacts at intertribal feasts. Colonial leaders followed suit, capitalizing on a vogue the American cranberry achieved in 17th-century London. In 1677, when King Charles II was angry at the colonists for making their own coins, the Massachusetts General Court ordered "tenn barrells of cranburyes" sent to appease the royal wrath.

The Indians called the cranberry sasemineash (sharp, cooling berry). But Pilgrims supplied its modern name. Its delicate, pale pink blossoms and stamen reminded them of cranes, so they dubbed it "craneberry," later shortened to cranberry.

New Englanders boiled the berries with sugar and ate them as a sauce, which became wildly popular. In a chapter of Joseph Thomas's Cranberry Harvest, historian Constance Crosby describes the sauce as "the great democratizer of American cuisine," because in the early 1800s, Yankees rich and poor "ate it cold at virtually every meal, with fish, fowl, meat and even lobster." In an 1808 memoir, a Frenchman who visited Boston complained about Americans' nonstop consumption of cranberry sauce, "vulgarly called cramberry sauce, from the voracious manner in which they eat it," he maintained.

Soon some enterprising Yankees began growing the berries commercially. The first was Henry Hall, a retired sea captain who owned a salt works in Dennis near a pond where wild cranberries thrived. He noticed that when sand drifted onto the vines, they seemed to grow bigger and juicier. Around 1816, he began transplanting wild vines to other sections of his property, which he cleared, sanded, and fenced, forming what he called "cranberry yards." They yielded a promising crop.

By the mid-1850s, cranberry growing was a significant industry in Massachusetts, mainly on Cape Cod. In 1854, the first official census of cranberry land reported 197 acres under cultivation in Barnstable County. Sea captains like Hall had kept cranberries aboard ship for the same reason British "limeys" ate limes; their high vitamin C content helped to stave off scurvy. When they retired, many of the captains became commercial cranberry growers, such as one "Captain Bill," who penned this ode to his new occupation:

There's nothing to me in foreign lands
Like the stuff that grows in Cape Cod sands;
There's nothing in sailing of foreign seas
Equal to getting down on your knees
And pulling the pizen ivy out;
I guess I knew what I was about
When I put by my chart and glass
And took to growing cranberry sass.

A century and a half later, roughly 550 growers are following Captain Bill's footsteps in the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts, where about 62,000 acres are under cultivation or in adjacent upland buffer zones. Southeastern Massachusetts turned out to have the conditions cranberries like best: peaty, acidic soil; a relatively cold climate that also allows a long, April-to-November growing season; and a ready supply of fresh water.

Though the word "bog" conjures up a picture of soggy, spongy turf, cranberry bogs must be well drained. They look like sunken basins, cut through with dikes and ditches and dammed on all sides to allow a winter flooding that protects the plants from cold and wind. In Massachusetts, where 70 percent of the bogs span less than 20 acres, they are shaped by the irregular contours of the land. Wisconsin growers, whose cranberry farms typically are newer and cut in huge, perfectly rectangular plots, call the Massachusetts bogs "cute."

Cranberrying is a family affair. Most of the state's bogs have been in the same family for two or more generations. When the land under cultivation became too large for one family to manage alone, the family hired neighbors and immigrant workers to help: Finns and Cape Verdeans, in particular, as well as local "swamp Yankees." Some enterprising immigrants saved their money and bought bogs.

When Ellen Harju's mother emigrated from Finland to the United States at the start of the 20th century, the piney swamplands of Carver, Middleborough, and Wareham reminded her of home. Like hundreds of Finnish immigrants, she sought work in the cranberry bogs. Ellen and her husband, Einu W. Harju, followed in their place.

At one time, almost every Massachusetts bog had a Finnish foreman. Finns were known as hard and willing workers, loyal and disciplined. Einu Harju was one of these foremen. He worked at the Chester Vose cranberry bog during the day and, beginning about 1930, built his own bogs at night on his farm in Wareham. He dug out the turf by hand, carefully stepping the bogs to conserve water, making ditches and a reservoir using just a shovel, wheelbarrow, saw, and one tractor. "He felt like he was sculpting the land," daughter Pat Zimmer recalls.

Some Finns lived in bog-side shanties built by the cranberry companies. Others, like the Harjus, built their own homes, with saunas in them. They cooked traditional rye bread, coffee bread, and fruit porridge, and they made their own rag rugs. They harvested berries on their bogs and on others owned by their countrymen, combing the vines with hand-held scoops with long wooden tines. The Finns knew one another, Ellen Harju says, and stuck together.

When Einu Harju developed diabetes, his daughter Pat began shouldering the farm work - with help from Phil Zimmer, a Wareham deputy sheriff whom she married in 1976 by a smoke tree on the Harju land. They built a log home by the bogs. But Phil got cancer. Then both men died, within 13 months of each other, in 1990 and 1991.

Now Ellen, 88, Pat, 51, and Pat and Phil's daughter, Kate, 18, run the 86-acre cranberry farm together. The year the men died, everything seemed out of kilter, they say, but somehow the crop grew anyway. "I remember standing there, watching the first truckload go out, the berries we had grown by ourselves, and I just stood there and cried," Pat says. "We didn't make a conscious decision about it; we just stayed in gear. . . . The day before my father died, he was out checking on the bogs. He had lost both his legs to diabetes, but he'd get out in his pickup and go. That's how you get this thing about adversity. You just keep going."

The three women are a study in contrasts and closeness: Ellen, with her neat attire and cool, unflappable ways, is "a tough old bird," says Kate. "When we get in a twitter, she calms us down." Kate, with her purple hair, eye glitter, and pierced tongue, is a talented musician and would-be chemist who just graduated from high school and now wants both to explore the world and to stay close to home. Pat, funny and gentle, is the family marshmallow, trying to take care of them both while also tending the farm. "She's soooo nice," says Kate, who wishes her mother would be harder on trespassers who constantly mistake their land for a park.

Cranberry growers are not like other farmers, Pat says. They don't grow row crops. Their specialty is an odd berry with four air pockets that lives like a desert plant in a swampland. And it wants sand, not ocean. Popular stereotypes to the contrary, the last thing a cranberry needs is ocean spray, she observes. Saltwater will kill even the healthiest vines.

For years, frost has been the cranberry's most dangerous foe. Located in some of the lowest areas in the state, cranberries enjoy its coldest weather, typically 20 degrees below Boston temperatures. But if bog-side thermometers drop below 29.5 degrees, an entire crop can be lost in minutes. Growers discovered that if they flooded their fields before the critical temperature hit, the water, which radiates heat as it freezes, would insulate the plants. But they had to be alerted in time to flood the fields before the frost arrived.

Today, Pat, like most growers, has a warning system linking bog-side sensors by cable to a small box in her home that gives a constant digital reading of the temperature. "It sets off a God-awful noise, like an alarm clock from hell," when a dangerous frost is lurking a few degrees away, she says. That's the signal to start the pumps that activate bog sprinkler systems.

In her youth, Pat tried other jobs, working as a sales clerk and a college information officer. But at age 27, she decided to come home. There are bog orchids on her farm, box turtles, foxes, deer, and more. The three women have counted about 50 different kinds of birds, including kingfishers, bluebirds, swans, ring-tailed hawks, wild turkeys, eagles, ospreys, and great blue herons. "Being here is part of me," Pat says. "It's where I want to be."

Now the women's commitment to their farm is being tested. For the first time, they aren't sure how to harvest the crop this year or quite how they'll survive. Like almost 90 percent of the state's growers, they usually harvest cranberries wet. This means the bogs are flooded about 6 inches above the highest vines. Then workers with enormous egg beaters on fat-tired vehicles churn through the water to dislodge the berries, which float to the surface. The result is a glorious-looking expanse of red fruit, like puddled wine. Then the berries are corralled with floating booms and gathered onto conveyors that lift them from the water into waiting trucks. This fruit is used mainly to make juice or sauce.

But cranberries also can be harvested dry for sale as fresh, whole fruit or as dehydrated, raisinlike berries that Ocean Spray calls "Craisins." For the dry harvest, workers use long-handled rakes or lawnmowerlike machines that move over the bogs with rotating teeth, combing berries off the vines and depositing them in burlap sacks. Next, they're emptied into crates, lifted off the bogs by helicopter, and transferred to flatbed trucks. In a maneuver fondly known as the "cranberry bounce," the berries then are sorted by a machine that puts them on a chute - where they're given seven chances to bounce over a 4-inch barrier. Berries too soft to bounce at least once are discarded.

Because the cranberry glut doesn't apply to fresh berries, for which there is no surplus, Pat says that for the first time, they will harvest about two acres of berries dry this year. To help with their cash flow, Kate also is working as a fund-raiser for her school's alumni association, and Pat works for a state-funded "Buy Local" campaign.

Kate says she loves their land and the feeling of space around her, the sense of stability under her feet. The very idea of selling any of it upsets her. But she's commuting to the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth this fall, a world of possibilities is opening in front of her, and the current economic crisis is making her think hard about whether to cast her lot with the cranberry growers of the future. "When you're making less than it takes to grow them, raising cranberries seems pretty stupid," she says. "So much work for so little profit, not that profit's the only thing that matters. But I'll probably grow them, anyway, because that's what we do."

Whether the Massachusetts cranberry business can be saved in its current form remains an open question. Most analysts think this unlikely. Some consolidation seems bound to occur, along with continued and perhaps more stringent federal controls on supply. As Ocean Spray's head of grower relations, Irene Sorensen, puts it: "Some growers say they have to learn to ungrow their crop, to idle. How can they not do what they've trained for so long to do, some for generations? You might as well ask them not to breathe." At least 10 percent of today's farmers probably will leave the business in two or three years.

Another piece of the answer must be renovation of Massachusetts's bogs for more efficient production to make them competitive with Wisconsin's. Here, though, growers are caught in a double bind: With so little undeveloped land in Massachusetts, there is nowhere for them to expand; and in their current economic straits, few have the $20,000 or more per acre necessary for renovation, anyway.

Tinkering to cut costs and improve production is part of this trade. With just 1,124 cranberry farmers in the United States, John Deere or International Harvester never considered making machinery for them, so growers have had to fashion their own. Keith Mann, 32, is one of the state's best-known tinkerers. He lives in Buzzards Bay with his wife, Monika, 32, and daughter, Magdalena, 3, in a house surrounded by bogs and decorated inside with pictures of more bogs and berries. A fourth-generation grower, Mann has devised all sorts of contraptions to improve their harvest over the years: An Everglades-style boat body with an airplane propeller is a water-borne fruit picker; a cart with an old truck windshield-wiper system pumps herbicides onto two beach towels wrapped around an aluminum carpet roll to be wiped over weeds; a modified coal train hauls debris cleared from ditches. Now Mann is building a 220-foot boom with a trolley that can spread seven tons of sand on the bogs.

With growers under the United States Department of Agriculture edict to sell 15 percent less than their average crop for the past six years, this is an ideal time for research. So Mann is one of many growers devoting patches of land to experiments that may help cut costs and labor. He has invited the University of Massachusetts Cranberry Experiment Station to conduct several studies, including a project to determine how pheromones can control persistent pests like the Sparganothis fruit worm.

For her part, Monika Mann is trying to develop a niche market for her organically grown "orcranic berries." She also makes organic chocolate-covered cranberries and specially sweetened dehydrated cranberries for diabetics. And she's starting a virtual farmstand, Orcranic.com, at which consumers can buy cranberry products on the Internet. Keith's father, David Mann, is tinkering imaginatively, too. With help from a commercial laboratory, he's making and marketing neutriceuticals, capsules containing powdered cranberries. A 1994 Harvard University study found that drinking cranberry juice can significantly reduce the risk of urinary tract infection. More recent research shows it also helps fight breast cancer, gum disease, and more.

But all the best studies, improved equipment, and boutique products will not save the cranberry without a major marketing effort in the United States and abroad. This is why many think the best hope for turning the industry around is Rob Hawthorne, a 55-year-old Canadian and former Pillsbury CEO leading a new team at Ocean Spray, the nation's top manufacturer of cranberry products. The Ocean Spray cooperative, which represents 66 percent of all cranberry growers, has just installed Hawthorne as its new chief executive officer; his former right-hand man at Pillsbury, Tim Chan, is new chief financial officer; and the former marketing wiz at Welch's, Randy Papadellis, is chief operating officer.

Hawthorne's office sits in the company's lushly landscaped Lakeville headquarters in a Colonial-style building flying its own cranberry flags on a 300-acre estate with a scenic pond and brook and several experimental bogs. The contrast between Hawthorne and the farmers' cooperative he represents could hardly be more dramatic. He looks and acts like a CEO straight out of central casting: neatly dressed in a white shirt and creased brown slacks, well-spoken, focused, exuding confidence and a palpable determination to prevail, no matter what. As CEO of Pillsbury North America from 1992 to 1997, Hawthorne says he increased its earnings from $230 million to $478 million. "By repeating things that worked" and "fishing where the fish are," meaning in the lucrative beverage pool, he and the others aim to restore the ailing cranberry business to health.

For years one of the nation's most successful cooperatives, Ocean Spray has a history of innovation. It introduced the first cranberry juice in 1930, the first blended juice - CranApple - in 1965, the first juice in a plastic bottle in 1986. Sometime after that, though, it lost its edge. Ocean Spray remains the best-selling brand of bottled or canned juice in the United States, getting 20 cents of every dollar spent in the grocery store juice isle. But while per-capita consumption of other fruit drinks and bottled water jumped more than 10 percent in the last five years, sales of Ocean Spray juices increased just 2 percent. "We were the leader, but we stopped innovating," Hawthorne says.

In addition to reorganizing staff into more functional units, Hawthorne plans to give cranberry juice a fresh image. New labels, easier-to-pour bottles, and an advertising campaign stressing its healthfulness are in the works. The Cranberry Institute also has eight studies underway probing the berry's health benefits. In the past, leaders wrongly decided not to stress the health value of the juice, Hawthorne says, for fear it would be seen as a medicinal product. A price drop is on the way, too, with a 30-cent decrease in the cost of a 64-ounce bottle of cranberry juice coming this fall.

Ocean Spray will be offering some new products, including three low-calorie juices with a less harsh-tasting sweetener, and slim "Crantastic" juice boxes with a "Cran-dude" character for kids. And Hawthorne is taking the cranberry on the road, hoping to plumb new markets in Europe and Japan, where its charms are not well known.

American farmers know how to grow cranberries, Hawthorne says. Now they have to grow demand in a shifting market with big-league competitors such as PepsiCo Inc., which owns Tropicana; Campbell's Soup, which owns V-8 Juice; and Coca-Cola, which owns Minute Maid. Looking back over the career of the saucy little berry, he and his staff feel confident that they can.

As Irene Sorensen says: "We built this whole odd, amazing industry on a tiny fruit that, face it, is pretty putrid." Chances seem better than even that the ever-buoyant cranberry, the American fruit if there ever was one, will bounce back.