New Jersey growers sanguine about crisis resolution

10/26/99 If the interviews in the Oct. 4, 1999 article from the South Jersey edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer are any indication, many cranberry growers in New Jersey are optimistic about the future of Ocean Spray and of the cranberry industry despite these times of a record crop surplus and economic uncertainty. William S. Haines, Jr. is co-owner of the largest cranberry company in New Jersey. He is also on the board of Ocean Spray. According the the Inquirer article, he "insisted Ocean Spray was as robust as ever."

He is quoted in the article as follows:

Nobody likes to see the prices of their product drop.
We do this for a profit, or we couldn't do it for very long.
We'll get through this.
That's the nature of farming, it involves a risk.
You never want to loose sight of that.
There are no guarantees.

Neva and Samuel Moore Jr. own a 700 acre cranberry and blueberry farm in Tabernacle, New Jersey. According to the article "she conceded that her family members had some concerns about how Ocean Spray marketed their fruits, but said they still believed in the company's stability." She is quoted as follows:

Farmers are optimistic, because they gamble every year with mother nature. I don't have to go to Atlantic City to gamble."
I believe it will level off and we will regain our market share.

The operations manager of the Ocean Spray receiving station in Chatsworth, New Jersey, Timothy D. Rued,  is quoted as saying the growers are a "very loyal group... the grower-owners objective was to maintain control of the cooperative."

Thirty-five of the forty-seven New Jersey cranberry farms belong to the Ocean Spray cooperative. New Jersey has been in the news lately as environmentalists took advantage of the surplus to try to block efforts to expand bogs into wetlands, stating that the need for additional acreage was exaggerated.

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