Wild Blueberry Farms Across Maine Suffer as Climate Change Upends Growing Seasons - Inside Climate News
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Last summer, the wild blueberry fields at Crystal Spring Farm turned red too soon.
Severe drought had gripped most of the state of Maine. At his farm near the town of Brunswick, Seth Kroeck knew the leaves were changing color prematurely because the blueberry plants were stressed. Berries shriveled before they could ripen.
The farm’s 2025 harvest was almost a total loss.
“We got about 7 percent of our expected harvest,” Kroeck, 55, said. Standing in his blueberry fields in April, he pointed out the new growth, still only a few inches high, and commented that last year’s yield was “a lot of raking with not a lot to show for it.”
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This was just the latest in a series of devastating weather for Crystal Spring Farm’s 72 acres of wild blueberries.
“In the last seven years, we’ve lost the crop three times, almost completely,” he said.
As the climate changes, these losses are getting more common for wild blueberry farmers. And, experts say, the solutions are pricey.
Maine’s Quintessential Fruit
Wild blueberries are an iconic food in Maine, like lobster rolls or whoopie pies. But they aren’t the same as the fruits sold by the pint in a grocery store.
Wild blueberries are smaller and have a stronger flavor than their cultivated counterparts. They’re typically packed and frozen rather than sold fresh.
Maine’s farms contribute almost the entirety of the United States’ commercially sold wild blueberries. The industry harvested nearly 88 million pounds of fruit in 2023, bringing $361 million in revenue to the state, according to the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine.
“It’s really something that’s a backbone industry to the state and a part of the state’s character,” Kroeck said. A father of two, Kroeck grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and said gardening with a friend “spiraled” into an agricultural career. In college, he studied printmaking—a degree that he jokes is useful every day on the farm.
One of the few native North American fruits, wild blueberry patches have often existed in the same spot for longer than the farms that now harvest them.
“The blueberry plants have been there for millennia, and they have been cared for by generations of farmers before me, and then the Indigenous community [before that],” said Kroeck, who also grows row crops and pasturage.
Wild blueberry bushes grow on sandy and gravelly soil in Maine, which can be difficult to irrigate. Credit: Sydney Cromwell/Inside Climate News
An individual bush only produces fruit every other year, so farmers typically harvest about half their acreage in any given year. Also called “lowbush” blueberries, the plants grow in dense mats on sandy, gravelly or otherwise low-nutrient soil, primarily in eastern Canada and New England.
“Blueberry soil is not nutrient-rich. Nothing else wants to grow there … but wild...