Wild blueberry growers in P.E.I., worried about low prices, look to tap into new markets

P.E.I.'s wild blueberry growers are still feeling the blues over the low prices for their harvest in 2023, and are now turning to new markets in hopes of providing more stability in the industry. 

Benny Nabuurs has a 400-acre wild blueberry farm in Cardigan, in eastern P.E.I., and has been in the business for 35 years. 

He said the volatility of prices has some producers thinking about getting out of the wild blueberry game. 

"In the last four years, we've seen record high prices, and they've slowly slipped down to record low prices," Nabuurs said. 

"To the point now where the prices that were offered last year were below what it cost to produce an acre of blueberries."

Last year, Nabuurs said growers were paid 35 cents per pound by Oxford Frozen Foods in Nova Scotia, and 40 cents from Morell, P.E.I.-based Jasper Wyman and Son. In 2022, they were paid 70 cents a pound.

To make matters worse, he said they only learned about the dramatic price drop in November, long after the harvest was over. 

"That makes it pretty difficult to manage your business," Nabuurs said.

"If the price offered is below the cost of production, you might decide not to bother harvesting a field rather than spend a high dollar figure to harvest the field only to find out that that there wasn't enough berries, or revenue generated from the berries, to pay the cost of harvesting."

The companies the growers sell to usually wait until after the berries are all harvested before they establish the field price, Nabuurs said. 

Members of the P.E.I. Wild Blueberry Growers Association would like to see buyers set the price earlier.

The association had put forward a motion to create a marketing board, but it did not pass. 

"The marketing board would have made [a] levy mandatory for all growers to contribute," Nabuurs said.

"The second thing that we wanted from a marketing board was to be able to sit down with the processors or the buyers, and at least establish what the field price is going to be before we started harvest, not after the harvest is complete."