Why more cranberry farmers are selling to conservationists, not developers

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In the South Coast towns of Carver and Wareham, green dominates the landscape. Winding roads dotted with the occasional house or building are flanked by sun-dappled trees. Rivers snake through the forested lands. Clearings reveal expanses of grass and sparkling ponds.

Signs reading “Williams Cranberry Growers,” “Sawmill Cranberries” and even “Cranberry Self Storage” hint at one of the South Coast’s most influential industries. And off “Cranberry Highway” and just over the Wareham-Carver town line, forest gives way to long stretches of open land with man-made ditches running through them: cranberry bogs.

Although green now, farmland from Plymouth to Middleborough to Cape Cod will blossom into red harvests from mid-September through early November. For over 200 years, cranberries have been a major crop in Massachusetts.

But now, in the face of a changing industry, economic pressures, and competition from other states and countries, many cranberry farmers are looking for different uses for their land. 

And many are choosing to do this in an environmentally friendly way: bog restoration. 

“They’re getting out of the business for whatever reason, but they would like to have a positive impact on the environment and the local community,” said Bill Giuliano, the state’s Cranberry Bog Restoration Program Manager under the Division of Ecological Restoration.

“So that’s where we come in, is to help them navigate a green exit strategy.”

The bogs are transformed to the wetlands they once were, before man-made irrigation systems and sanding were made to the land. Doing so allows these habitats to naturally keep pollution out of water supplies. Many become nature preserves that include public spaces for walking and recreation.

“The land needs to be managed, and Mother Nature needs to be assisted in some ways,” said fourth-generation cranberry farmer John “Gary” Garretson III.

A changing industry

Cranberry farming started in the South Coast in 1816 when a Revolutionary War veteran spearheaded commercial production of the fruits. 

The industry provided job opportunities for immigrants from Finland and Cabo Verde, fueled innovation and technology, and eventually became so integrated in the economy that Massachusetts children could leave school to work the bogs during harvest season, according to the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers Association, also known as Massachusetts Cranberries. 

The state dominated the cranberry industry nationally and globally until the mid-1990s, when production costs, a lack of capital, and less productive bogs caused it to fall behind Wisconsin and Canada. Faced with a critical financial situation about 10 years ago, the state government created the Cranberry Revitalization Task Force in 2016 to address these problems and reduce the number of growers leaving the industry. 

Brian Wick, executive director of Massachusetts Cranberries and a member of the task force’s Exit Strategies Sub-Committee, said that while the task force has helped the industry, it is still in a downturn. 

Because cranberries in Massachusetts tend to be older varieties, they aren’t as productive or pest-resistant as newer varieties in places like Wisconsin and Canada. This makes it difficult for Massachusetts’ farmers to compete without renovating their bogs — a costly process that can take years before a decent crop can be produced again.

The state’s Cranberry Renovation & Enhancement Program helps growers who want to revitalize and improve their operations to stay in farming, but many farmers don’t take this option, Wick said.

“For some, that’s still something that is not really available for them or the right fit for them,” Wick said. “When you retool a cranberry bog, when you renovate it, it takes three or four years to start getting a decent crop again. It might take eight to 10 years to break even.”

Garretson, owner of the Slocum-Gibbs Cranberry Company, sold his 1,652 acres of land to the Buzzards Bay Coalition this spring for $9.5 million, the largest-ever purchase in the coalition’s history. The land, in and near Wareham, will be permanently protected as open space and will officially open to the public in spring 2027. 

Garretson said it cost him about $1 million to $2 million a year to operate his business, which comes to about $6,000 for each acre of land (he has about 200 acres). Labor costs have also increased as farmers need to pay competitively to appeal to people with the necessary education and training. 

“The industry no longer requires a strong back and a weak mind,” Garretson said. “We need smart, articulate people that will solve the issues we have.”

Slocum-Gibbs went from having hundreds of people harvesting his bogs to seven people involved, due to technological advances and changing skillsets. Though Garretson sold his land for personal reasons, not financial issues, he says changing economics is a reality farmers in the industry need to face.

Massachusetts farmers are also facing a “generational transition,” Wick said. The average age of a cranberry farmer in Massachusetts is over 60, and many farmers are looking to retire. In the case of family-owned farms — many of which are three to four generations — if there is no relative to pick up the business, it’s difficult to justify the costs needed to continue production.

“If you’re in your 60s or 70s, are you going to want to take on a project that you’re not going to see real positive net income from for a decade or more?” Wick said.

Rising tariff prices, climate change, taxes and labor and utility costs are also making it difficult for some farmers to keep up.

“There’s an incentive for folks to get out because they can’t compete,” Wick said.

For growers who were leaving, the task force developed a “green exit strategy” for them to exit in a “financially and environmentally friendly way.” 

“Cranberry acreage going out of production could provide viable solutions for wetland mitigation and water use challenges faced by the region,” the task force’s final report stated.  

From this came the move towards bog restorations. 

What is cranberry bog restoration?

Restoring a cranberry bog returns the land back to its natural state. Cranberry farming involves processes such as sanding, ditching and using water control structures that change the way the surrounding land and water operates. So when a bog is retired, it usually needs some help getting back to its wetland state. 

This is where state programs and conservation groups step in to help.

The Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration established its voluntary Cranberry Bog Restoration Program in 2018 to assist those considering alternative uses for their land, according to Giuliano.

“DER’s goal, working with partners, is to help landowners who want to pursue a conservation and restoration path,” its website states. The program has helped restore hundreds of acres of retired cranberry farmland working with local, state and federal partners over the past 10 years, according to their website.

The old cranberry farms are typically turned into nature preserves that are also public spaces for recreation and walking like The Bogs in Mattapoisett, a newly restored nature preserve by the coalition, which opened in December 2024. 

Other projects include the Eel River Headwaters Restoration Project in Plymouth, the first cranberry bog restoration completed in Massachusetts; the Tidmarsh Farms Wetland Restoration, the largest restoration in the state, and the Foothills Preserve Project, both also in Plymouth; and the Coonamessett River Project in Falmouth.

Ecological benefits of cranberry bog restoration include improved water quality, soil development, increase in wildlife, and open space for public enjoyment, according to The Living Observatory, a public-interest learning organization that studies the impact of wetland restoration.

The projects are typically owned by nonprofits, but some restored bogs are owned by the state, cities or towns, and current or former farmers.

The state program has completed eight restorations so far since DER’s first project in the early 2000s and 12 are currently in progress. As projects like the Tidmarsh Restoration were successfully completed, Giuliano said other interested landowners “popped up.”

“Cranberry bog restoration really showed them the value, not only to the landowner, but to the community, to the environment,” Giuliano said.

Brendan Annett, vice president of the Watershed Protection for the Buzzards Bay Coalition — one of the environmental groups the program works with for these restorations — said the concept of ecological restoration started in the 1990s and began with wetlands. 

“People started to understand that if we do all these activities next to the water, it changes the quality of the water resource,” Annett said. 

Both Annett and Giuliano said as they complete more successful projects, more people are open to restoration.

“We didn’t need to convince him,” Annett said, referring to a recent sale with a landowner in Acushnet. “Our actions sort of did the talk.”

As more environmental organizations, partner land trusts, towns and state agencies continue advancing these projects, they learn from each other, and land conservation overall has become more understood, Annett said.

“It’s still relatively new,” Giuliano said. “And so we’re continually trying to learn and improve.” 

A personal decision

For many farmers in Massachusetts, their cranberry farms have been in their family for several generations. The decision to use their land for a task other than farming is not made lightly. 

“The farmer, more so than other landowners, is so connected to the landscape,” Annett said.

About 70% of the state growers are small family farms owning less than 20 acres of bogs, according to the Massachusetts Cranberry Revitalization Task Force’s final report from 2016.

Garretson said the size of cranberry farms makes it a “whole different type of caring about the land,” compared to farms growing crops like corn or soybeans that are on average about 10,000 acres. 

“It’s so personal because if you’re really a good farmer, you’re part of your property,” he said.

While the decision to sell his land — which has been in his family since 1919 — was difficult for him and his family, Garretson said it was “absolutely the right decision for us.” Restoration is the “next best thing” for the land apart from cranberry farming, he said. 

He stressed that while conservation is “nice to do,” his decision was not an industry-wide decision he is advocating for.

“Other farmers will figure out what to do on their end,” he said. 

Other options for cranberry farmers

So what other options do farmers looking to exit the industry have? 

Wick said options are limited because cranberry farms are “pretty much set up for cranberries.”

Most farmers’ first option is keeping their lands in agriculture by selling to another cranberry grower. Some choose partial retirement — selling some land, but still farming the most viable bogs.

But growers trying to drive down costs need to focus on efficiency. So a small collection of bogs is not always beneficial.

“[The bigger growers are] not having bogs spread all over the place, because now your crews have to go to different towns, your equipment has to get moved,” Wick said. “All that just costs time and money.”

The next choice for most farmers is restoration, Wick said. 

A third route — although not a popular one — is placing solar panels on the areas surrounding the bogs and selling the energy to solar companies. 

“People realized that’s not the greatest option,” said Scott Lajoie, communication director for the Buzzards Bay Coalition. “[There] are much better places to put solar panels than on cranberry farms.”

Similarly, farms can serve a “dual use,” with solar panels installed and crops or livestock beneath them.

But “that’s not really a retirement,” Wick said, because “someone still has to farm the land.” 

Commercial development is usually the last option, Wick said, because farmers prefer “the land be as close to nature as it [can be].”

Lajoie said the coalition offers money for the land to farmers, and they can compete with many of the offers by development companies. So the decision comes down to what farmers “want their legacy to be.” 

Annett said the coalition aims to protect areas with “natural resource values” — like rivers, wetland habitat complexes and forests.

“Our role isn’t to say that we don’t want development,” he said. “We need places to live and work, but we also need certain places to remain natural.” 

Garretson said he was “besieged” for years by developers hoping to buy his land. He sold to the coalition to give Wareham a “calm before the storm” — referring to his now-preserved land — before bumping “into Target and everything in West Wareham.”

He recalled his grandfather telling him at 17, “don’t let the bastards get the property.” 

“We wouldn’t have wetland areas in Southeastern Massachusetts without the cranberry bogs,” Garretson said.

As the industry continues changing, Wick said more cranberry farmers will likely retire. He said the number of farmers exiting the industry has accelerated and will most likely continue in the next five to 10 years.

Despite less cranberry farm acreage in Massachusetts in the future, the industry’s output will remain “strong and viable,” Wick said.

“What we’re going to see in the bogs that remain is that the growers farming them will be higher-producing,” Wick said.

Garretson said the industry needs more long-term thinking, which might involve not harvesting cranberries for a few years to complete bog renovations, so they can be more fruitful long-term.

“Bogs don’t go away,” he said. “[You] don’t plant a crop and forget about it. That’s not an alternative. You need to make sure they carry on for a long time.”

For farmers looking for different uses of their land, bogs are “sterling pieces of property,” he said. 

“It’s a farming tradition that is very gentle on our land compared to so many other uses of land and farming,” Lajoie said. “We don’t want cranberry farming to go away, but we do have to realize that its future is not in as many acres of land.” 

Crystal Yormick, a journalism student at Boston University, is a summer intern at The New Bedford Light. She can be reached at cyormick@newbedfordlight.org.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Monday, Aug. 4, 2025, to clarify a sentence regarding the coalition’s ability to financially compete with developers.