BLUEBERRIES

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Colorful contemporary photo of blueberry bushes along the Kal-Haven trail. The sun is shining at the top of the image, illuminating the leaves and berries on the bushes. Image Credit: Kurt Maxwell

Michigan is one of the nation's leading blueberry producers and Van Buren County, where you are right now, is the center of that industry.

Blueberries have thrived in the acidic soil and microclimate of this region for thousands of years. The Bodéwadmik (Potawatomi) were the first to cultivate miinen (blueberries).

Wild blueberries are smaller than those grown commercially. Agricultural experimentation and innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries created the larger berries found in today's grocery stores.

Harvest Time

A black and white postcard titled 'Dr. Keef's Blueberry Plantation, Grand Junction Mich.' shows four people picking blueberries; the group stands between two rows of blueberry bushes. Two people work the left row, their faces hidden by blueberry branches. A boy wearing overalls and a white shirt picks berries on the right, while a man in a white shirt and dark hat watches him from close by. Image Credits: Dick Godfrey

A 1956 black and white postcard titled 'Blueberry Harvest, Jones Bros. Farm, Grand Junction, Mich.' Amid rows of blueberry bushes, men, women and children stand, bend over and squat to pick blueberries. Most are dressed in white and wear a hat or bonnet. Far from the workers, streams of water spray in an arc over several rows of blueberries. Image Credits: Dick Godfrey

A 1960 black and white postcard titled 'Part of the blueberry pickers colony, Dr. Keefe's Farm Grand Junction, Mich.' Along a dirt road that winds from the right foreground to the back left sit two gray canvas tents and ten identical one-room cement-block houses, many flanked by metal washtubs and buckets. The houses are simple but well kept. In the center, two large metal drums sit next to a small wooden post. Image Credits: Dick Godfrey

Today, farmers use both mechanical pickers and seasonal laborers, most from Mexico or U.S. Hispanic communities, to harvest the fruit for market. U-Pick blueberry fields are part of local agricultural tourism.

Blueberry Innovation

A black and white head-and-shoulders photo portrait set in an oval frame. Stanley Johnston is a dark-haired man dressed in a black suit and tie with a white dress shirt. His clean-shaven face has smiling eyes, a small closed-mouth smile and slight cheek dimples. Image Credit: Archives of Michigan

Stanley Johnston, superintendent of Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) South Haven agricultural experiment station, opened the first commercial blueberry farm in Van Buren County in 1928. James A. Keefe, a Chicago dentist, was his financial partner. Johnston focused on fruits that could survive in colder climates, introducing Bluehaven and Northland blueberries in 1967.

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