Source: The verge

By  Andrew Liptak

Keith Mann faces the same problem each year: frost.

The icy condensation is detrimental to his crop in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the modern American cranberry industry. As the temperatures drop into the fall months, the owner of 150 acres of cranberry bogs throws on some layers and preps a network of sprinklers, which spray enough temperate water to keep the vines above freezing until the sun rises.

This is no small feat. With hundreds of sprinklers deployed across his field, checking each nozzle would require a team of people working throughout the night. Recently, Mann came across a solution: a drone.

“I’ve always been an RC enthusiast,” Mann told The Verge. “I’ve had RC helicopters and planes since I was a kid. What I find most useful is I can scan over all my acreage in a short period of time.”

Last Christmas, he purchased DJI Phantom 4 drone. In the early morning, he sends his drone over fields, providing him an aerial view of the land, allowing him to point out where some of the sprinkler heads aren’t activating. “Flying at 300 feet, they stick out like a sore thumb.”

Mann is just one of many Massachusetts farmers who have been using technology in innovative ways to adapt to a changing climate, along with increased competition from farmers in other states. In the birthplace of the cranberry industry, tech and data might hold the key to survival.

CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

Mann and his wife Monika now operate Mann Farms, which has become a forward-thinking farm within the Massachusetts industry. But he’s worked around cranberries all his life. “It’s a family business,” he said. “I’m a third-generation farmer on my father’s side, and a fourth-generation farmer on my mother’s.” His father holds the distinction of being the first to harvest the berries in the way that you’re probably most familiar: wet harvesting, when flooded bog fields are covered with floating cranberries. And his grandfather was one of Ocean Spray’s first salesmen.

The cranberry industry, as Mann knows, has long benefited from technology of the time.

The industry that produces the cranberry juices, sauces, and snacks we see today on grocery store shelves turns two centuries old this year. Cranberries had been known to Native Americans for millennia, but in 1816 a former ship captain named Henry Hall began cultivating the wild plants on his property after he noticed that they grew better when covered with sand. The industry took off from there, fueled by the use of cranberries aboard transatlantic sailing ships.

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