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M a i n e — A P h oto P o rt r A i t o f t h e P i n e t r ee S tAt e P r o f i l e s i n e x c e l l e n c e 116 J asper Wyman opened a seafood canning plant in Milbridge, Maine in 1874. Not long thereafter he also began canning the wild blueberries found along the coast and the barrens of Downeast Maine. Now, nearly 140 years later, Wyman's is the premier marketer of Maine's wild blueberry crop. Still proudly owned by the Wyman family, the company farms 10,000 acres of wild blueberry fields and pro- cesses the berries at two processing facilities in Maine and Prince Edward Island, Canada. Wild blueberries are "wild" because they've never been planted. They are from a root system that is in- digenous to the thin sandy soil of glacial Maine and date back many hundreds of years. Wild blueberries are known as "lowbush" blueberries due to their low- to-ground stature. They are one of North America's three native fruits (along with cranberries and con- cord grapes). Native Americans noticed that wild blueberries grew better after forest fires and thus adopted the practice of setting fires to the land to clear compet- ing vegetation. While this practice has been largely replaced by mowing the land after harvest, it dem- onstrates the primary role of the grower to be one of managing, rather than planting, the crop. Each wild blueberry field possesses many different clones which provide the crop with their unique sweet/tart flavor. Some are sweeter than others, some are more tart. Some are lighter in color and some are very dark. But it always averages out blue and delicious. Wild blueberries only crop every two years. Thus in any given year, half of Wyman's land is bearing fruit and the other half is sprouting and developing buds for the following year. Wild blueberries adapted to the long winters/short summers of Maine, and the best crop is one where the buds have a nice snow blan- ket protecting them from the winter winds. This is fol- lowed by a spring warm enough to open the buds into small white flowers. Wyman's then places 2-3 bee hives per acre into the fields (taking care to protect those hives from the bears) and hopefully in the warm sunshine of May the bees will go about their busy work and pollinate the crop. Little green berries form almost as soon as the bees leave, and since a ripe blueberry will be about 88% water and 12% solids (mostly sugar and fiber) Wyman's fields need about one inch of water per week during the June-August growing and harvesting pe- riod. What Mother Nature doesn't provide, Wyman's can partially replace via irrigation systems in that short growing season. The harvest generally runs the month of August and is finished by Labor Day. In addition to Wyman's 140 full-time Maine employees, another 500+ seasonal workers are hired. Wild blueberries were harvested by hand until the late 1990s, but now most are harvested by machines. Because of the low-to-ground plants and the harvest practices, very little of the wild blueberry crop sells as fresh produce. Virtually the entire crop is processed — cleaned, washed and frozen. The fac- "We understood the concept of 'continuous improvement,' or 'Kaizen' in Japanese, due to our success in that market. Sustainability was nothing more than applying continuous improvement to how we manage our natural and human resources." August harvest on the Barrens. Wyman's of Maine P h o t o s c o u r t e s y o f W y M a n ' s o f M a i n e