It’s harvest season for New Jersey’s cranberry farmers. But will the drought affect the Thanksgiving side dish staple?

“There’s going to be sufficient cranberries. Whether they come from New Jersey or not is a question,” said Joe Darlington, owner of Joseph J. Farms and a fifth-generation cranberry farmer.

Darlington is hoping for any signs of rain as he looks over his now dry and dusty cranberry bogs.

“There are growers who have stream supplies like the two that have gone dry, and I know of a couple that went dry a while ago. They certainly don’t have any for harvest and they’ve lost their crop for the year,” said Darlington.

With his limited supply of water, Darlington says his harvest will be close to average.

“I only have water because I have water in the reservoir, and I can move it from reservoir to reservoir or to bog to bog,” he says.

The water in the reservoir can be recycled and pumped from bog to bog. Preparing for the winter season requires flooding all the bogs, protecting the cranberry plants from freezing.

“Whereas for harvest we are flooding 15 maybe 20 acres at any given time. For the winter we will need to flood 350 and that’s going to be a tough call,” Darlington said.

Most New Jersey growers are part of the Ocean Spray cooperative, which includes other states like Wisconsin and Massachusetts. Darlington says Ocean Spray will pull extra cranberries from those regions to make up any loss from the New Jersey farms but the expenses to deal with these ongoing drought conditions are on the individual farmers, like frost protection.

“You need someone up in the middle of the night and in the middle of the harvest that’s a real tough call. I had one guy work a 22-hour day the other day,” said Darlington.

He estimates the farm will need at least 5 inches of rain to prepare those bogs for winter.

“I don’t see that anywhere in the forecast,” he says.

Darlington says the best way people can help his fellow New Jersey cranberry farmers is simply by buying Ocean Spray products this fall. Since it's a cooperative, the participating farms will receive revenue generated by the sales.