Apr 7, 2007
Grower Finds Success At Supermarkets

From mid-May until the end of June, blueberries fly out of the packing plant at Sweet Berry Farms.

In those six weeks, three million pounds of blueberries will be sold, bringing in the whole year’s income for the three families that own them. They grow blueberries and nothing else.

“We farm collectively, but each of us owns our own land,” said Joseph Benton, who farms with his father-in-law, Chester Barnhill, and his brother-in-law, Kiah Barnhill.

Sweet Berry Farms is located in Ivanhoe, N.C. It has been expanding, and total plantings have reached 625 acres. However, only 300 are currently producing berries.

Lots of other people depend on the income from that crop. About 10 employees work year round and another 20 work seasonally; planting, pruning and spraying. In addition, about 500 seasonal migrant workers pick and pack fruit during the intense six-week season.

They capture a good market, Joseph said.

“We get about $16 for a flat of 12 one-pint containers. At the end of our season, when New Jersey berries come in, the price starts to drop pretty fast.”

Sweet Berry Farms won some publicity in food packaging magazines two years ago when it adopted new clamshell packages made of a crack- and crush-resistant copolymer of crystal polystyrene and styrene-butadiene. The container has a hinged, snap-fit lid and is made by Fabri-Kal in Kalamazoo, Mich.

The oriented polystyrene containers they had been using had a tendency to crack, periodically resulting in line shutdowns. The 32,000-square-foot plant operates three fillers and six lines.

“Our previous containers had a horrible failure rate,” Benton said. “They would crack under the pressure of the pinch roller, jam the unit and stop all sorting and filling. Many of the original containers got damaged on the truck and would be rejected by the supermarket.”

Sweet Berry asked Fabri-Kal to develop a cost-effective alternative that would improve machinability and provide the shelf appeal supermarkets want. The package also had to properly vent the berries while maintaining sufficient structural integrity to allow multi-layer stacking.

Not only did it work then, it still works.

“We’re still using the same company and the same technology,” Benton said. “On our biggest day last year, we filled 294,000 pint containers.”

Production over the six weeks follows a bell-shaped curve, Joseph said.

“Of the six-week harvest, we do maximum production for one week. The entire six-week period is very much a bell curve, with the peak of the harvest around weeks two and three. Then the production begins to slide downward again.”

Carolina Bays

Sweet Berry Farms is located on land called “Carolina bays,” Benton said.

“Some people think they were made by meteors and others say comets,” he said. “Whatever, they are oblong depressions lined up northwest to southeast, ranging in size from 20 acres to 4,000 acres, each with a high sand hill on the southeast end. They contain sandy soil filled with organic matter over a hardpan, and that’s good blueberry land.”

Sweet Berry Farms is still expanding, so some new land is cleared and planted each year. The plantings are made on elevated beds formed using a V-plow to provide an evenly drained field, and then solid-set irrigation is installed for both drought prevention and frost protection.

“Blueberries are shallow-rooted,” Benton said. “Putting them up on beds encourages them to go deeper for water. The irrigation provides an insurance policy so we don’t lose plants to drought ¬– and we need the irrigation anyway for frost protection.”

Fresh Sales Through Broker

Sweet Berry Farms uses both mechanical and hand harvest, and there’s no trend to phase out, either. It uses several varieties, but the goal is to get a high yield of quality fruit for fresh use. About 10 percent goes into IQF berries for use by bakers.

“A lot of the best varieties don’t harvest well by machine,” Benton said. “Berries that do harvest by machine tend to be smaller and firmer.”

Sweet Berry Farms works with a large Florida broker that handles its sales. The broker markets only blueberries, blackberries and raspberries and has well-established connections with retail grocery stores, Benton said.

The search is always on for better varieties, especially those that resist mummyberry disease. That disease requires four or five fungicide applications each spring – and the fungicide that did the best job for them is no longer available. The farm relies on four or five Southern highbush varieties and “a couple of rabbiteyes.”

Varieties also vary by how much pruning they require. In recent years, the farm has used a modified flail mower mounted on a front-end loader to mechanically top the bushes and bring them down to about 4 feet in height. Still, most plantings require pruning every two or three years to remove old, woody canes and keep the bushes productive.




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