Urbanization Devours Blueberry Farms

The high price of real estate in Northwest Arkansas is turning blueberry farms into subdivisions.

“Blueberries will have to go somewhere else because property’s too valuable,” said Wendell Johnson, who decided to convert his 7.5-acre blueberry farm east of Fayetteville (along with another 17.5 acres) into 71 residential lots. Johnson had been farming blueberries for 20 years.

From 1997 to 2002, the number of blueberry farms in Benton and Washington counties decreased 22 percent from 32 to 25, and the number of acres planted in blueberries decreased 16 percent from 198 to 167, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the two counties still lead the state in blueberry acres and number of farms (with Benton County being No. 1).

New health claims about the antioxidant benefits of blueberries have made the fruit more popular nationwide.

Arkansas ranks No. 10 nationally in blueberry production. But, while blueberry production is up 23 percent across the U.S. since 2003, it has decreased by 9 percent in Arkansas.

Arkansas blueberry farmers can make up to $12,000 off one acre of mature plants during the harvest season, said Les Dozier, president of the Arkansas Blueberry Growers Association in Lowell.

But around Fayetteville, an undeveloped acre of land off Arkansas Highway 16 East (near Johnson’s property) can sell for $50,000, according to one area appraisal firm.

Many blueberry farmers in the area are reaching retirement age, and that kind of money is attractive to them.

Urbanization and a labor shortage have also affected the ABGA, which packages the blueberries from farms and ships them to be sold at retail stores across the nation.

“[The association] is barely hanging on, and the reason is that you’re losing all the farms,” said Dozier, who also owns Sta-N-Step Blueberry Farm in Fayetteville.

Sprouting Houses

Many other blueberry farmers have done as Johnson did.

Forrest and Modyne Lane sold their farm near Springdale. Harvey and Clyde Eubanks, who had one of the first farms in Northwest Arkansas, sold their Rogers farm to developers.

But some farmers, like El Orwig, continue to farm blueberries because it’s a passion. He works full-time for the University of Arkansas as an associate director of computing services and has owned the Blueberry Patch in Rogers for 16 years. Orwig said he’s not ready to sell his 7.5-acre farm just yet, but the idea of retiring is something he’d consider.

“I have been approached several times,” Orwig said. “I haven’t got the right price yet.”

The price of land has not only driven farmers to sell their farms, it has also kept them from buying acres to plant blueberries. But that’s not just in Northwest Arkansas. The number of acres has dropped for the entire state, even with bigger farms appearing in the north central part of Arkansas. Over the past 10 years, the number of harvested acres in Arkansas has declined from 600 to 530 in 2005.

Blueberry Market

Jim Moore is considered by some area farmers to have pioneered the commercialization of blueberries in Arkansas. In 1964, Moore went to work at the UA as a professor in the horticulture department after spending years in the northeast part of the U.S. studying blueberries.

Moore said he noticed wild blueberries growing in Arkansas, so he figured cultivated blueberries could grow in the same climate and type of soil. Through the university, Moore was able to start an experiment station and wrote a book on blueberry production. Moore retired from the UA in 1997 as a distinguished professor.

In 1969, Ed Brown started the first commercial blueberry farm in Madison County. Soon afterwards, the ABGA was formed. Blueberry farms flourished for a while in Arkansas, peaking in the 1980s and eventually dropping in the 1990s, Moore said. Even in 1992 there were 700 harvested acres with 1.8 million pounds in total utilized production, according to the USDA.

“I think one of the main problems around here was marketing,” Moore said about the decline in the blueberry market. But in 1999, even with the decrease in the number of farms, production picked up and so did the value of production.

In Arkansas, there were 550 harvested acres that produced 1.38 million pounds in utilized production in 1999. The average cost for blueberries jumped from $1.05 per pound in 1999 to $1.19 per pound in 2000, bringing in about $1.58 million in production, according to the USDA.

Blueberry Demand

Moore credits the population boom in Northwest Arkansas with the increased demand for blueberries. But supply is outweighing demand. Farmers — those who are left — can’t produce enough blueberries to keep up with the demand from customers. That has driven the price up 41 percent in Arkansas from $1.23 per pound in 2004 to $1.74 per pound in 2005.

“[The business] is doing very good,” Dozier said. “Anyone in Northwest Arkansas that has berries, they’re sold.”

Dozier said on any Saturday in June when the crops are ripe and ready to pick, he will have about 100 customers on his 3-acre farm in four hours. He said he’s adding another acre this year, which will cost about $10,000 to put in, including plants and irrigation.

In 2004, Dozier’s sales increased 14 percent over the previous year, but a late freeze and frost in 2005 curtailed his crop yield and resulted in a 50 percent drop in sales last year.

Dozier said things are looking good for the crops this year, although some farmers are worried about the drought. Irrigation is important for blueberry farms. Next to the cost of land, water is the second most expensive aspect of blueberry farming, he said.

Another problem plaguing farmers is labor. Picking berries is labor intensive. That’s one of the reasons why farmers, like Wendell Johnson, have decided to develop the land instead. Orwig, who owns the Blueberry Patch, said he has about 100 employees harvest the crops in June, but he also has a pick-your-own business, which is becoming more popular with customers.

Arkansas blueberries ripen sooner than blueberry crops in many other states, but the state is falling behind the national trend.

“Production now is quite a bit less than it was in the mid to late 80s,” said John Clark, a professor in the department of horticulture at the UA. “What’s interesting about that is that blueberry production in the country and the world has been in a steep incline, and Arkansas is counter to that.”

One of those reasons is recent research that shows eating blueberries are healthy, providing antioxidants to protect cells in the human body. In 2001, a study conducted by the USDA and Clemson University showed that chemicals found in blueberries, raspberries and strawberries protect cells against cervical and breast cancer.

In the U.S., blueberry production has increased 23 percent from 189.65 million pounds in 2003 to 233.03 million pounds in 2005, according to the USDA. During that same time period, Arkansas’ blueberry production dropped by 9 percent from 1.65 million pounds to 1.5 million pounds.

ABGA

Although blueberry farms are struggling in Northwest Arkansas, the acerage of blueberries has increased in other parts of the state, Moore said.

From 1997 to 2002, White County saw its number of blueberry farms increase from six to nine but total blueberry acerage jumped a whopping 503 percent from 34 to 235 acres.

In the River Valley region, Crawford County had an increase from eight farms and 17 acres in 1997 to nine farms and 23 acres in 2002.

While Northwest Arkansas has the population to bring in customers, other parts of Arkansas depend on the ABGA.

Mountain View has four farms that belong to the ABGA, Dozier said, and there’s only one left in Northwest Arkansas. Still, blueberry farms are prospering in other counties.

Dozier said 10 years ago there were about 30 farms that were members of the ABGA, and many of those were located in Northwest Arkansas.

“When I first started, I sold [blueberries] commercially through the association,” Orwig said. “In the past years, most of the sales are off the farm partially because of the population in Northwest Arkansas. There’s more demand than supply locally.”

Orwig said he gets customers from Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and Kansas. He has about 50 to 100 customers each day in June. It’s supplemental income for Orwig and many farmers with small crops who do it part-time.

And small farms are doing well, Dozier said. If an acre can get a farmer up to $12,000, then a crop of about 7 acres, like Orwig’s, has the potential to bring in $84,000. With numbers like that, farmers in Northwest Arkansas don’t see any need in the association anymore.

However, for large farms in small-populated regions, they depend on the association, Dozier said. The cost to ship the blueberries in bulk doesn’t hurt large farms as they do smaller farms like Dozier’s.

“There’s a lot of expenses in shipping out [blueberries],” Dozier said. “It averages $20 a flat, or 12 pints, to ship.”

The berries are shipped to brokers in Michigan who then sell them to retail stores, like Wal-Mart, around the U.S. During the winter months, blueberries found in U.S. grocery stores are from Argentina and Chile, Dozier said.