As Luc Decubber walks along a long cranberry bog on Canneberges Becancour, a vehicle that looks like a cement truck sucks up millions of the tiny red berries. The tart cranberries shoot up into a conveyor system where they’re stripped and dumped into a truck.
“We’re going to get almost 200 million pounds this year,” he said looking out over his 8,000-acre farm, one of Canada’s largest — it’s an amount that should translate to roughly $62 million on the U.S. market. Some 30 years ago, there were only two cranberry farms in Quebec.
But thanks to growing awareness of the nutrition contained in the berries — it’s a strong source of Vitamin C among other benefits — demand has steadily increased, and the number of farmers in the province with it. “People are suddenly interested in cranberries,” said Marie-Michelle Chartier, an industry spokesperson.
The modern harvesting process, which is handled by sucking the berries out of long, flat, shallow canals called bogs, is interesting enough that a burgeoning tourist industry is cropping up around it. In St-Louis-de-Blandford hundreds of tourists paid a visit to Decubber’s cranberry farm this Thanksgiving weekend.
The centre, about an hour and 45 minutes east of Montreal, is open just one more weekend this year — the weekend of Oct. 15. from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday to Sunday.