Turkey Talk: Lessons from Ocean Spray

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

I’ll be honest. When it comes to cranberries, my knowledge starts and stops with Ocean Spray commercial. So today, we’re going to learn.

In 2022, farmers in the United States grew some eight million barrels of cranberries. Sticking with our Midwest is best theme for a lot of the Thanksgiving meal, or at least Midwest is most abundant, it is Wisconsin that was the top producing state for the year.

Cranberries are a unique fruit. They can grow and survive only under a very special combination of factors. These factors include acid peat soil, an adequate fresh water supply, and a growing season that extends from April to November. Cranberries grow on low-lying vines in beds layered with sand, peat, gravel and clay. These beds are commonly known as bogs or marshes and were originally created by glacial deposits.

Cranberries can be picked from the vine in a dry harvest which is most commonly used for those sold as fresh fruit or by flooding the bogs, knocking off, and eventually corralling the fruit. This second process is put to use to make products such as juice, dried cranberries, and that Thanksgiving punch – the cranberry sauce.