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Cranberry Happy Thanksgiving!

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This blog post is coming to you from Cape Cod, indeed almost exactly from the location of the first Thanksgiving.  And it's from this location that we wish our American colleagues the best of this holiday season!

And one of the most traditional parts of the traditional meal served on this very American holiday is cranberry sauce or cranberry relish.

 However, there is concern that the state’s popular native fruit may be affected by climate change. Scientific research indicates that heat stress, insecticides, rising sea levels and other factors will affect the harvesting of this little blood-colored fruit with the distinctively tangy taste.  Botanists have, in fact, been working on projects to develop new cranberry strains that they hope will be hardier.

These are green-by-definition projects, as described in our book, Green Project Management, which, in honor of the holiday, we are renaming Cranberry Project Management.

 An article on the front page of today’s Cape Cod Times newspaper highlights these projects, and the research projects which examine the impact of climate change on cranberries - one of only three native cultivated fruits in the United States. The others are blueberries and Concord grapes.

From the newspaper story:

 Especially in Massachusetts, “we have a special feeling, I guess you’d say, for the little fruit,” said Susan Playfair, author of the new book, “America’s Founding Fruit: The Cranberry in a New Environment.”

 Playfair, whose interest in climate change stemmed from sailing around New England in her youth, gathered The United States produced more than 8 million barrels of cranberries in 2012, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center.

 The cranberry is especially connected to Massachusetts, where it is the state fruit. Cranberry cultivation began on Cape Cod in 1812; Ocean Spray has its world headquarters in Middleboro. In the United data from bogs and researchers, reaching out to Boston University biologist Richard Primack. Along with Primack Lab researchers Elizabeth Ellwood and Caroline Polgar, they published the study “Cranberry flowering times and climate change in southern Massachusetts” last fall. The study found that cranberries flower roughly two days earlier for every 1 degree centigrade temperature increase, Primack explained.

 Complicating the temperature threat is a problem with pollination. A lot of pollinators are being killed by insecticides or fungicides, Primack said.

 “It’s a big problem with cranberries if they’re not getting pollinated enough, so often, their fruit yield is lower,” Primack said. “Growers are sometimes having to bring in honeybees to pollinate the crops. ... Temperatures are getting warmer, which is not so suitable for the bees.”

 Storms also are a problem, other cranberry experts say. As sea levels rise, storms have the “potential to move fertilizers off the farm in runoff, which is bad for the environment,” said Carolyn DeMoranville, director of the UMass Cranberry Station.

From a project management perspective, the issue is timeframe.  Currently there is a glut of cranberries.  So for the short term, it looks like everything is (excuse the pun) peachy.  But in the long term – thinking in terms of decades – temperature increases and sea-level rise also must be considerations and indeed have triggered the projects we’ve mentioned above.

Again from the article:

In a recent talk at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Playfair acknowledged that the effects of climate change on cranberries were long-term, not sudden. “I think what’s a little deceptive here is that we’re talking about something that’s gradually happening,” she said.

So our message to you: think long-term.  It may help in your current project and may be important to you in planning new projects.  Have a cranberry on us...right now, there's a surplus.  But it may not always be so.


Posted by Richard Maltzman on: November 27, 2014 10:52 PM | Permalink

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