Land

2023

Blueberry Blues

Whitewater Ranch blueberry farm adapts to shifting climate, a fly pest and global competition.

Blueberry Blues

Land

2023

Whitewater Ranch blueberry farm adapts to shifting climate, a fly pest and global competition.

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A quarter million blueberry plants cover the fields of Whitewater Ranch along the McKenzie River at Leaburg, east of Eugene, Oregon. Fieldwork begins in early spring.

Words by Eliza Lawrence | Photos by aj miccio

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On a sunny day in late July 2022, organic blueberry farmer Jim Russell ran from his home to his fields in a panic. The long rows of his 250,000 six-foot-tall blueberry bushes in Leaburg, Oregon, sat peacefully as he approached. Dressed in a worn pair of jeans, a long sleeve button shirt, and a baseball cap, Jim frantically grabbed a gallon-size bag, put salt water in it and started picking fruit off the bushes, dropping them in his bag and squishing them to break the skin. Halfway down a row, he ran into the farm manager of Whitewater Ranch, Seth Morgan, who was also madly plopping berries into a bag of salt water.

Even with the calming waters of the Mckenzie River rushing by, both Jim and Seth were terrified. The reason for this commotion was essentially invisible, but both men were searching for the presence of the spotted wing drosophila (SWD), a fruit fly formally known as the drosophila suzukii. Native to Southeast Asia and detected in Oregon in 2009, the drosophila, a yellowish-brown fly with red eyes, has since ravaged Oregon’s blueberry industry.

The single female drosophila can produce up to 600 eggs per year using her ovipositor, a saw-like tube-shaped organ, to cut into the firm skin of the berry where she lays eggs at a blueberry’s peak ripeness, rather than when the berries are rotting (like the fruit flies you find on your kitchen counter). In just a few hours, a drosophila egg hatches into a tiny larva that feeds on the fruit, spoiling it. A few days later a pupa, or small fly, emerges from the berry and matures into an adult within a week. The cycle of attack repeats, with this new adult drosophila laying eggs into berries.

When Jim and Seth placed berries in their bags, they were searching the surface of the salt water for tiny floating drosophila larvae. A few hours earlier, a buyer for Organically Grown Company, the company that buys blueberries from Whitewater Ranch, had discovered a single larva in a pallet of berries. While there is no harm to consumers if they eat the larva, the buyer has a strict zero-tolerance policy for its presence.

Neither Jim nor Seth found any infected blueberries in the field that July morning. But Jim estimates that the single larva discovered in a pallet of berries cost him about $3,000. If more pallets, or a truckload, had been infected, the loss could have been closer to $28,000.

Jim has experienced many changes in the two-plus decades he has been farming here. Besides the threat from the drosophila, the seasonal rhythms of the blueberry crop itself have shifted. Global temperatures are increasing due to climate change and the weather in the McKenzie River is becoming more extreme: winters are getting wetter and colder and summers are getting drier and warmer.

In a typical year, Jim and the other seven employees spend January and February hand-pruning all 250,000 blueberry bushes. In March, crews go through each row and look for any signs of weeds and fertilizer the soil.

In April, the plants bloom and white flowers blanket the fields. By the middle of June, “shot berries,”or little green blueberries, begin popping up. By mid-July, Jim says “grape-sized balls of blueberries have miraculously appeared” and harvest begins. The berry picking machine runs in the morning to avoid heat and afternoon sun that can make the berries soft and easily bruised. Crews pick berries until the end of August, sending crop to the buyer during the entire harvest season.

The most important part of this schedule, according to Jim, is between when bees pollinate and when the berries are ripening. Ideally, flowers would bloom in April, and pollinators would come out regularly for a few weeks. Ninety days later, Jim would harvest. Jim believes that if the berries “can all get pollinated within a small window, the bushes will be covered with completely ripe fruit,” and harvesting can go smoothly.

Unfortunately, the spring of 2022 was overcast and cold, and the bees couldn’t get out regularly. Instead of pollination lasting two weeks, it lasted six. When it came time for harvesting, bushes held both green and blue berries, which makes machine harvesting difficult. After a cold and wet winter during 2023, “the berries are three weeks behind where they would normally be” says Jim.

The 2021 season was the opposite: hot and dry. During a heatwave in Eugene at the end of June, temperatures reached 113 degrees, and “basically burned off the top 20 percent of the blueberries,” and caused them to be “baked on the plants,” says Jim. The ranch tried cooling the plants down with tiny sprinklers every few feet in the fields to mist the bushes. Unfortunately, this micro irrigation just steamed the blueberries. The extra moisture also has the potential to cause mold and mildew, increasing the risk for the presence of the drosophila.

Wildfires pose yet another climate-induced risk to Whitewater Ranch. The Holiday Farm Fire in 2020 forced Jim and his family to evacuate the ranch. Since the fire came through in early September, harvesting had just wrapped up. The blueberry plants themselves are pretty hardy, but Jim thinks “a fire would take them out” if it occurred in the area during peak harvest. The Holiday Farm Fire destroyed the whole irrigation system when the flames melted all the pipes.

Pat Wheeler leans against a wire fence. Her hair is grey and curly. She wears a white button up with suspenders running the length of her torso. In front of her, someone walks holding a large insect net.

These blueberry buds will bloom into white flowers that by mid-July produce grape-sized balls of blueberries that owner Jim Russell says “miraculously appear.”

Smiling students line tables at the Selma Field Institute. In front of each student is a microscope and light. Light from a projector fills the right side of the photo.

Logging and recent wildfires have denuded hills surrounding Whitewater’s blueberry fields. While shade trees were lost to the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire, blueberry plants were not harmed.

Fortunately, a sense of calculated problem solving on the farm is pretty central to Jim’s personality. After graduating college from the University of Oregon in 1984, he and his wife, Jane, moved to San Francisco. Jim began working in investment banking until 2000, when he wanted to start something new. Coincidentally, his in-laws had bought Whitewater Ranch in 1983, struggling to both raise cattle and plant Christmas trees.

Through a window, Lincoln holds a pointer up to a screen while he teaches a class on bees. It is dusk out and the outside of the building is a rich blue.

In March, months before berry harvest in late summer, workers will hand trim these blueberry canes to uniform length. This will facilitate machine harvesting on the 86-acre ranch.

When Jim and Jane arrived in Leaburg to begin working on the farm in 2001, they originally were selling Christmas trees. In 2012, they planted 30 acres of olives for oil production, and as a backup, seven acres of blueberries. When a big cold front moved in and wiped out the olives, the blueberries looked great. That’s when Jim realized he was a blueberry farmer.

Jim has been able to control the impact of the drosophila at Whitewater Ranch through two main methods, physical and cultural.

The first method of drosophila control requires constant monitoring of the crop as it nears harvest. Seth puts red solo cups filled with an inch of red wine vinegar every 100 feet along the perimeter fences, river, and forest, to bait the drosophila. A few times a week, someone checks to see how many drosophila have been caught. Typically, there will be one trap at either end of a row which makes it time consuming to go through and check all of them. Also, the bait in the traps may attract more flies than it traps. Still, the traps help Jim get a really good estimate of the number of flies in his fields. Typically, Jim says “they’ll find twenty drosophila throughout the entire field.”

The second method is simple: keeping the fields clean. Workers on the ranch keep the grass short, pick the berries when they are ripe and remove fallen berries quickly.

“If no one harvests the berries, even if they’re crappy, the drosophila will get into it,” Jim says. “And once it rots, other bugs will get into it, too.”

For the 2023 season, Jim worries most about declining prices for his berries. Specifically, he worries his berries will reach peak ripeness at the same time as berry crops ripen in other states and countries. The Oregon blueberry crop is one of the only ones to ripen in mid-July, while those in California, Florida, Georgia and Mexico tend to reach peak ripeness earlier in the summer. Recently, berry growers in Peru have flooded the market in mid-July, reducing the price a U.S. farmer like Jim can get for a crop.

In response, at least for the 2023 harvest, Jim plans to sell his blueberries to the frozen fruit market rather than as fresh fruit. Historically, this has been less profitable, but Jim is confident that because the price for fresh berries has declined, and pressure from buyers for perfect looking berries has intensified, sales into the frozen market will likely provide better profits.

A former banker, ranch owner Jim Russell is fascinated by changes he sees in plants and soil each year. “Although it’s challenging, it’s enjoyable work. As long as we can make enough money to pay the crews and keep the machinery running, it’s a nice way to spend the day.”

With the seasons changing, Jim is looking forward to temperatures rising and the beginning of the harvest.

At the end of July, heavy, ripe blueberries weigh down the bushes. Whitewater Ranch’s pair of bright yellow 17-foot tall picking machine pickers rumble towards the berry-laden rows under the guidance of Jim or Jane. Plates inside the picking machines bump berries from the bushes onto a conveyor belt, carrying them up to a sorting platform. Here, two workers remove twigs and leaves from the harvest as another worker stacks palettes filled with berries that moments earlier hung on the bushes. When the picker hits an area with lots of fruit, “everyone shouts for the driver to stop to slow down the waterfall of blueberries on the conveyor belt,” says Jim.

As harvest starts, anticipation and excitement abound. At some point in the season, “there’ll be something that comes up that seems insurmountable, but the whole crew will rise to the occasion,” says Jim.

When Jim is in the field on one of the pickers, he’s not thinking about the large climatic changes, the threat of the drosophila, or what blueberry farmers in Peru are doing. Rather, he’s grateful that another harvest has arrived.

“It’s amazing to get up before the sunrise and look out over the fields. It’s surreal. It’s hard to believe. This is what I’m doing. This is where I live. This is our product.” Jim says.