If this wasn’t bad enough for Maine’s 500 or so wild blueberry farms, it comes against a backdrop of being caught up in President Trump’s trade wars with China, a global glut of blueberries – and the impact of coronavirus.
There are, in simple terms, two types of blueberry plants – the wild and the cultivated.
The wild is native to the north eastern states of the US, particularly Maine, and over the border in Canada.
It cannot be planted commercially. Instead, farmers tend and harvest it where it is found naturally. For this reason, plus the fact it needs cold winters, it has not expanded out of its home region. Most production is in Maine, with a small amount in neighbouring New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
By contrast, cultivated blueberry varieties can easily be planted on a large scale. They are also far more tolerant of warm weather and produce much higher yields of far bigger berries. So they are now increasingly planted across the US and around the world, in countries such as Peru.
