Christmas is arriving early again. Just when Halloween inaugurates us into November and always before Thanksgiving has had its full due, this holiday season of gold, silver, red, and green heartily greets us with boisterous fanfare. For some, it is a marvelous thing to spend more time celebrating their favorite time of the year. But for others, we feel robbed of some precious crook of time.
However much some of us have got it bad (or good), when it comes to an all-too early Christmas, the largest organic cranberry grower, owner of Sandhill Organics Dan Wandler, has it worse (or better). He starts his holiday season in the middle of September when his 65 acres of marshland turn into beds of bright red cranberry dots clinging to crawling evergreen shrubs. Acres of red and green proffer this standard holiday garnish that practically sings Christmas carols.
For Dan, the holiday season wasn’t always so swift. Until 1997, he worked in manufacturing, based out of Milwaukee and traveling to Chicago 70% of the time. Tired of the rat race, he partnered with his father to buy land near his family’s cabin. He noticed how cranberry growers in the area did reasonably well, so he took a chance.
“When I got into this business, I thought it’d be like watering grass and watching it grow while I sat back in a lawn chair,” says Dan, “Growing cranberries turns out to be the hardest job I’ve ever worked, and I’ve had some pretty tough jobs in my lifetime.” He continues, honest and emphatic, “Cranberries need babysitting 24 hours a day. They want so much attention. It’s as if they’re my kids and if I don’t watch them close enough, they’ll do something I don’t want them to do.”
Even garden journals gently warn against growing cranberries, exhorting it can’t be done without the proper facilitation. But with the right irrigation, pumps, harvesting machines, acidic soil and sand, cold temperatures, and 24-hour watch system, it must not be all so bad—because Dan begins our conversation by candidly saying, “I’m lucky to have a job I virtually enjoy everyday…I can think of maybe one day I didn’t like.”
The cranberry marshes start demanding attention in spring, the “Frost Watch”. Frost damage must be avoided when new buds peak their heads at winter’s end and berries burst forth at fall’s beginning. “When temperatures cool, we start the irrigation system to keep the new growth warm,” Dan says, explaining why they water their fields when it’s cold. “The properties of water are fascinating. The buds are actually kept warm inside the ice-casings that form, like inside tiny igloos.” Without constant watering, these igloos will freeze through and destroy Sandhill’s crop. That’s why he and his four full-time employees are on continuous watch, making sure all the sprinkler heads are turning and spraying properly. There are 850 sprinkler heads to monitor. Dan clarifies the tenuous relationship that keeps him awake at night at summer’s end: “In the fall, we want the ground to cool to increase the berry’s sugar and color—but not freeze it.”
Sandhill doesn’t dance with the cold too long. With another 35 employees, they finish their harvests by November 1st. They flood the beds with 6” to 8” of water and harvest the beds with two machines, either the Beater or the Fresh Picker. The Beater knocks the cranberry loose with little regard for its appearance; it ends up being shipped to processing for juices and such like 95% of cranberries grown in the U.S. But Sandhill’s harvest consists of 50% fresh, whole cranberries. So they use the Fresh Picker, its six-foot comb gently nudging precious rubies. Whatever is not combed up is beaten out, a grand total of some 600,000,000 pounds of certified organic tart sweetness.
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, practically mid-sentence, Dan interjects, “I cannot fully explain how amazing this whole process has become since working as an organic farmer.” When Dan first started, he trained with a conventional farmer and then continued those practices on his own land in 1998. Until 1999, he had never even heard the term, “organic”. His younger sister clued him in. “She buys everything she possibly can that’s organic,” he says, “So I asked her why she did it and she told me about the risks pesticides had on her kids and the earth. Eventually, I thought she might be right, that there could be a better way than just throwing chemicals at things.”
So in 2000 Sandhill began transitioning half their acreage to organics, a rough road at first. “Nobody I’m aware of knows how to grow organic cranberries,” Dan relates, describing how these last six years have made them into the leader of organic cranberry research and development. The changes they adapted were drastic learning curves they managed on their own. “The university would tell us what we were doing wasn’t going to work. Our natural fertilizers acted slowly, which is very different from conventional fertilizers. And the first two years we lost our transitional crop to insects. But we were willing to try it out and to be patient.”
In the end, the pay-off in not throwing chemicals at things has been manifold. Dan does not have to spend an hour stripping down from a Chem-suit and gas-mask after being in the bogs to hug his daughter. “She can hug me whenever she wants and I don’t have to constantly warn her about not going near the bogs.”
Another motivation that has turned reality is Dan’s own control of a market separate from a multi-billion conventional cranberry corporation. Sandhill cranberries are sweeter and more resistant to disease than conventional and the soil is healthier, attracting a myriad of visitors. “You won’t see as much wildlife on a conventional cranberry farm as on our marsh,” says Dan after describing how eerie the bogs would become after spraying chemicals. The noises of the night would dissipate, no owls, frogs, crickets. Just silence and darkness. Now the farm’s ecological balance buzzes with wildlife all year, especially the cranes. “There are lots of cranes at Sandhill. I was almost going to name the company after them, Sandhill Craneberry Farm.”
The busiest time of the year for Sandhill is now over. Without their holiday decorations, the marsh has turned into a deep crimson mat of dormancy that requires less attention. Every few years, they spend the winter “sanding”—re-flooding the beds, freezing them over, and coating the frozen pond with dump-truck loads of new sand that will eventually melt down to the vines to help them grow strong. “This year is a sanding year,” Dan says optimistically, resembling nothing of an exhausted father of cranberry newborns.
Dan’s cheerfulness might have something to do with a revelation of hope he clued me in on, amidst the benefits he has found farming organically: “Organic farmers are world changers.” Knowing this, no wonder he loves his job everyday. And since Dan says it is so, wait, you see. It’ll only be time before —for the good of us all— they figure out how to slow down Christmas.
Mercedee Renz, Goodness Greeness
