By ERIK OLSON

The Daily News via Associated Press

LONG BEACH, Wash. (AP) -- For cranberry grower Malcolm McPhail, the warm weather this week is making harvest time at his bogs on the peninsula rather pleasant. Unfortunately, he laments, the sunny skies are about six months too late.

A bitter winter, frosty spring and cool summer cut back cranberry production by at least 20 percent at McPhail's CranMac Farm in Long Beach, a 123-acre operation he runs with his wife Ardell and their two sons.

"We'd like to have a nice, warm summer to ripen up the fruit," said McPhail, 74, an Ocean Spray co-op grower for three decades.

It's a bitter harvest this year for cranberries, $3 million business on the Long Beach peninsula. But experts say the future can still be sweet for cranberry growers, thanks to new technology in growing and harvesting crops.

Production for Ocean Spray's 32 growers on the peninsula will likely be down about 30 percent this year, said Steve Kelly, manager of the co-op's Long Beach processing plant. Ocean Spray officials say they expects prices to rise slightly, but the production losses likely will cut peninsula growers' revenue by several hundred thousand dollars.

Ocean Spray, the nation's largest cranberry marketer, expects nationwide production this year to fall below 7 million barrels, a 6 percent downgrade from previous estimates. About 6.9 million barrels of cranberries were produced in 2009, with more than half the yield coming from Massachusetts and Wisconsin, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Early forecasts indicated a excellent blossom and a large 2010 crop nationwide, but the harvest was downgraded this fall, said Mike Stamatakos, an Ocean Spray spokesman. Incessant summer rains in Wisconsin, scalding summer heat in Massachusetts, and a cool and wet growing season in the West all reduced cranberry production, Stamatakos said.

On the Long Beach peninsula, growers know they can't force Mother Nature to improve the weather, but they're experimenting with strategies to fight back.

McPhail has planted one acre with a new strain of cranberry called "Crimson Queen," which was developed by Rutgers University in New Jersey to yield more berries per vine. Also, the farm bought a new piece of harvesting equipment with an old name -- a harrow -- that is designed to gently shake loose the berries and better protect the vine tips for next year's harvest.

McPhail said the two new techniques should increase production in future harvests.

"The name of the game is weight. You want to get more weight out of a given bog," McPhail said.

New varieties of cranberries could be the key to offsetting bad weather in coming seasons, said Kim Patten, a Washington State University horticulturist who studies cranberries in Long Beach.

"They're not as sensitive to a lot of the (weather) variables. They're more consistent in the yield," he said.

For now, new varieties -- including the Crimson Queen, Mullica Queen and locally developed Willapa red -- are limited to a few acres of bogs owned by large-scale growers because they are too expensive to mass produce, Patten said. Pilgrim cranberries are the most common on the peninsula, growers say.

Demand for Ocean Spray cranberry juice and Craisins, a sweetened, dried cranberry snack, has remained steady, helped by strong marketing over the past few years, McPhail said. Prices have risen to about $60 per barrel, five times higher than the lean years of the late 1990s, he said.

"It's a fun crop to grow. Right now, it's more fun because the prices are good," McPhail said.

___

Information from: The Daily News, http://www.tdn.com

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.