Why Cranberry Country is Turning into Wetlands

The Washington Post / Anna Phillips

12:23 JST, November 27, 2024

MATTAPOISETT, Mass. – As the sun set on a November afternoon, Brendan Annett walked through a wetland preserve, greeting everyone who passed him by with the enthusiasm of a mayor at a ribbon cutting.

Which he kind of was. Annett, who oversees conservation projects for the nonprofit Buzzards Bay Coalition, had recently finished work on the site known as Mattapoisett Bogs that, for more than a century, had been a working cranberry farm. As the industry waned here, the family who owned the land had sold it to the conservation group, which had set about transforming it back to the wetland it once was. Walking trails had just reopened to the public. But as ducks paddled in placid water and late-afternoon light turned the reeds and rushes to gold, it was easy to imagine it had been this way forever.

Southeastern Massachusetts has been cranberry country for more than 200 years, ever since a Revolutionary War veteran discovered he could transplant wild vines to a swamp near his home on Cape Cod. But falling prices, competition from cranberry growers in Wisconsin, Quebec and Chile, and climate change have made it increasingly difficult for the state’s farmers to continue on – and has led to a boom in conservation projects as some look for an exit strategy.

Scientists and state officials are seeking to enlist retired cranberry bogs to filter out pollutants and defend the state’s coastline from sea level rise, strategically deploying wetlands and swamps against future threats.

Those involved share a sense of urgency, fueled by the knowledge that they are in a race against a tangle of competing interests. Housing developers, solar companies, sand and gravel mining outfits all want the same valuable real estate: undeveloped coastal land.

“This opportunity won’t be here in 25 years,” said Christopher Neill, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who has studied restored bogs. “These growers are not going to hang on, they’re going to make decisions and the land won’t be available forever.”

As sea levels rise and climate change fuels more powerful storms, coastal states are increasingly looking for places that can take on more water. In Massachusetts, much of the work to turn cranberry bogs back into wetlands is experimental. Most finished projects are only a few years old and many more are still in the process of being purchased and designed.

But 12 years after the first bog restoration was completed, the results suggest a path other states might follow as they warm to the idea that time-honored defenses like sea walls and dikes may not be enough in a changing climate.

Wetlands are well-known for their extraordinary environmental benefits. Along with providing wildlife habitat and absorbing carbon dioxide in their soil, they also act as filters, siphoning off human waste, chemicals, fertilizers and other pollutants before they reach rivers and bays. Coastal communities depend on them to recharge underground aquifers, absorb increasingly extreme rainfall and mitigate storm surges.

Yet for centuries, Americans have drained wetlands for agriculture. Despite some federal and state protections, wetlands continue to be bulldozed, filled and paved over. As of 2019, Massachusetts estimated that, since colonial times, almost one-third of its wetlands had been destroyed.

Coastal wetlands – salt marshes flooded daily by the tides – are beginning to disappear beneath rising seas. The prospect that Massachusetts will lose most of them is unnerving for conservation biologists and state officials, and it is one of the main reasons the state is investing in cranberry bog restoration. As rising water pushes tides further inland, the state is hoping salt marshes can adapt and move with it. “In many cases, these cranberry bogs will provide space along the coast for salt marsh migration,” said Beth Lambert, director of the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration.

Conservationists and state officials, often working together, have turned 400 acres of former cranberry bogs back to wetlands. Another 14 projects are in various stages, from early planning to under construction. State officials said they hope to restore and protect another 1,000 acres of dormant cranberry bog over the next decade.

Neill, who has watched the evolution of these projects, said cranberry growers were skeptical at first.

“There was this enormous tension. They saw conservation as just trying to push them out of business,” he said.

That tension began to dissipate in 2016, when industry and state officials came together to confront the problems facing growers and concluded that putting land into conservation might benefit farmers. To stay competitive, cranberry growers needed money to modernize their bogs, replacing heirloom varieties of the fruit with more productive vines. If they took their most challenging bogs – those most vulnerable to disease and rot in a warmer, wetter climate – and agreed to stop farming them, a federal program would pay them to restore the land. Growers could retire or use the money to shore up their business.

“We are in an upward trend in terms of interest in retiring cranberry bogs,” Brian Wick, executive director of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers’ Association. “It was a bog here, a bog there. There wasn’t a whole lot of demand for it. Now we’re seeing definitely more growers interested.”

Economics and farmers approaching retirement age explain much of the shift, but climate change is also a factor. In the last eight years, there have been three record-breaking droughts in southeastern Massachusetts, Wick said, as well as unusually heavy rainfall that caused fruit to rot. Color is now a big concern. Cranberries need cool nighttime temperatures in order to turn red. But unseasonably warm fall weather has delayed that process, postponed harvests, and caused berries in shades of white and pink to linger on the vine so long that they become overripe.

“It’s not dire, but it’s making farming more challenging,” Wick said.

Some of the largest cranberry farms have sold off land to housing developers, or gotten into the real estate business themselves. The A.D. Makepeace Company, North America’s largest cranberry grower and the biggest land holder in eastern Massachusetts, has put 3,400 acres under conservation protections in the past 15 years. At the same time, the company has converted many more acres of its dry land and pine forests into solar arrays, housing developments and retail space, including a Marriott hotel in Wareham that overlooks several cranberry bogs.

“The reality is, years ago, the company recognized the need to diversify because of the challenges in the cranberry market,” said Makepeace chief executive James Kane.

Demand for building sites soared during the pandemic, raising land prices and sending conservation groups scrambling to come up with more money. That pressure hasn’t gone away, Annett said. But some cranberry farmers are wary of the changes and view conservation as a way to protect their family legacy and the rural character of their towns.

“People end up having an emotional connection – or feeling like, oh, this is a better outcome. And then they are often willing to try to convince others,” Annett said.

A great deal of his work involves negotiating these land sales, a delicate process that can take years. The projects come with high costs and regulatory hurdles. The price tag for restoring Mattapoisett Bog was $2 million. But there is no option to allow nature to take over unassisted, Annett said, because generations of farming practices have fundamentally reshaped the land.

“You don’t get the benefit of rebuilding a real rich, diverse, and fully functioning wetland if you just let these bogs go,” he said.

To design a new wetland, engineers are brought in to map the site, tracing historic peat deposits to understand how water moved through the land. Excavators and bulldozers remove layers of sand. Workers plug ditches and remove water control structures. In the century since the bog was built, homes, bridges and roads have likely gone up nearby. The wetland’s designers have to take all of this into account – they don’t want to flood the neighbors.

There is one thing conservationists have learned they don’t need to do: replant. Buried under the soil, a bank of native seeds is ready to reclaim the land.

The difficulty of this work came into focus at one site, an abandoned cranberry bog built right at sea level that Annett’s organization was working to restore. Even as he talked about creating a new salt marsh, he pointed out that it would not last.

Little by little, rising sea levels would drown the land. His team’s efforts here would go under.

“We’re not restoring salt marsh. We’re trying to rent salt marsh for as long as we can,” he said. “While we think of another idea.”