Blueberry Post-harvest update

Posted by Sapan Behar

August 17, 2007

Today was the last day of harvest season. It was a difficult harvest season for almost all farmers, with labour shortage and uncooperative weather. Heavy rains during the second and third week of July caused extensive damage to the Fraser Valley blueberries for the fresh market. Most of the fruit during these two weeks either fell off the bushes as it was too ripe and could not be picked due to the weather, or was downgraded to process stock as the berries were too wet and soft.

Production was already down this year due to a severe winter and a very wet spring. There was also a shortage of bees, so important for pollination. As such, berries were small in size as well as fewer in number.

We had excellent production at our farm, but suffered due to weather and our contractor bailing out on us. As we scrambled to get another contractor in, the berries were falling off the bushes or splitting as they were too ripe. However, we still averaged 5 tonnes per acre, an extremely high yield for immature plants that were going through their third and fourth season of picking. We lost about 10% of the fruit due to the weather.

All in all, an excellent year for us as far as production is concerned. Consider this, there are a number of blueberry farms for sale in the Fraser Valley, in full production, that are producing around 4-5 tonnes an acre. And these are advertised as having excellent production. This underlines the fact that if you are looking to buy a blueberry farm in the Fraser Valley, you need a Realtor who knows blueberries working for you, but that is a topic for another post.

Moving forward, I will be starting a series on blueberry pest management in this blog. This is to give all the new farmers a timeline on what they should be doing and looking out for in their farms.

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