An excerpt from "The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and OBSESSION" by Adam Leigh Gollner.
Just as the crisis in apple growing led to Grapples, crashes in other fruit prices are leading to similarly intriguing solutions. "Growing cranberries used to be a pleasant way of life," says Hal Brown, moderator of a cranberry discussion group, www.cranberrystressline.com. It's pretty, it's scenic, you could make some money, hire an employee or two, pay them a 30k salary. Unfortunately, the fruit's value declined from eighty dollars a barrel in the 1990's to twelve dollars a barrel in 2001. If prices had stayed up, we could have easily made 300k per year. Thank God my wife is a librarian and I'm a psychotherapist.
Brown has led the charge against a misguided attempt to market white cranberries as a new variety of cranberry. The original label on their juice stated: "These all natural fully ripened, white cranberries come from the first harvest of the season so they're milder than traditional red cranberries." Brown wasn't impressed. "White cranberries are just unripe cranberries, " he said. After he complained about these "outright lies" at the Federal Trade Commisssion, the language on the label was changed. "There's no dirty secrets about growing cranberries," he says. "It's the marketing of them that has the dirty secrets."
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This was the last newspaper article published about Carnberry Stressline, in 2005. During its time it was the subject of a fair amount of media attention because of its influence, some of these can be read here.
The story of the website began in 1999 when only about half of the approximately 2,000 cranberry growers in the country used the Internet on a regular basis. As the website became the primary means of daily communication about cranberry industry problems between growers in Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, New Jersey and Massachusetts, more and more of them bought computers. Within a few years almost all cranberry growers were online.
The website itself had two parts, one was a news and opinion section similar to Casino-Friend.
The other was a message board called the Stressline Forum and was similar to the numerous special interest message boards online today. That board had many of the same problems we observe today with the blogs and message boards which allow anonymous comments about our own casino controversy. Consider the following from the Patriot Ledger article "End of the line for cranberry website"
Discord abounded among the ranks of new and old growers alike. And dissatisfaction with Ocean Spray, the Lakeville-based growers cooperative, which processes most of the cranberries in the United States, began to spill over.
Much of that angst surfaced in the Stressline's chat room, which Brown called the ‘‘forum.''
Later, when a group of growers staged a proxy battle that resulted in the replacement of most of Ocean Spray's board, the Stressline was a hotbed of debate about the merits of the old regime versus the new.
John Decas, a processor and grower in Carver, said the Stressline's reach became apparent when he heard industry analysts across the country referring to its contents.
Its broad readership exposed a dark side, too. The anonymity of the postings on the forum meant that anyone could say anything, true or not, with no repercussions.
‘‘It was being read by the marketplace,'' Decas said. ‘‘The downside of that is people put misleading information on there that could have hurt us in the marketplace.''
I even received a letter from Ocean Spray's attorney threatening legal action (see below) if I didn't reveal the IP address of an anonymous poster. I didn't comply although I did remove the messages that rightfully were objected to. Debates on the fourm were just as heated as any on the casino related message boards. The CEOs of two cranberry companies, smaller than Ocean Spray but still multi-million dollar companies, regularly posted on the website and engaged in spirited debate with all comers and once in awhile with each other.
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