BROOKSVILLE — A river of blueberries flowed off a conveyor belt at the Spiech Farms packing house and into plastic clamshells that suggest this area's agricultural future may be a little like its glorious past.
In the pre-freeze heyday of the local citrus industry, the names of Dade City and Brooksville traveled the country on the lushly illustrated packing-crate labels of brands such as O-Mi-O, Blue Heron and Zeneda.
The labels on Spiech's 6-ounce polystyrene boxes show the sun rising in a blueberry-blue sky, and, just like in the old days, the name of the town that proudly produced the fruit, "Brooksville, FL."
The opening of a packinghouse is big step, an indication that Hernando and Pasco are firmly established in the blueberry business, that Brooksville should long be a worthy host to the annual Florida Blueberry Festival, the next edition of which is scheduled for this weekend.
In a state that, one grower said, should be a "terrible place to grow blueberries," farmers started planting new, heat-tolerant strains of berries about 20 years ago.
There are now enough growers in this part of Florida to support a packinghouse, said Tim Spiech, who operates the plant for his family's Michigan-based company. And by opening such a facility last year in the 20,000-square-foot plant south of Brooksville once used by Hernando Egg Producers, Spiech Farms is not only betting that there will be more growers in the future, but that the convenience of a nearby packinghouse will encourage more farmers to get into the business.
"We refer to this area as a produce desert. There is a lot growing here, but there is nowhere to take it," Spiech said. "Our nearest competition is Plant City and Lakeland."
The farms near those towns, along with growers in Alachua County, still account for the main share of the roughly 6,000 acres in Florida devoted to blueberries, said Gary England, a Lake County agricultural extension agent who is conducting a statewide inventory of growers.
But there are several hundred acres of blueberry farms in Hernando, Pasco, Citrus and Sumter counties — a respectable number in an industry where a 50-acre farm is considered a good-sized operation.
This progress and promise is all the more remarkable in a climate naturally hostile to blueberries, said Bill Braswell of Bartow, former president of the Florida Blueberry Growers Association.
"They are a cold-weather plant, and we're in Florida," Braswell said.
And while blueberries like rich, acidic soil, Florida's is notoriously sandy.
Growers here compensate by planting in beds of pine bark, which is high in tannic acid, and by hitting a market window after Chile's harvest at the end of March and before the start of Georgia's in early May.
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Explore all your optionsThey compete by using new varieties of berries, which is why Braswell thinks Florida's market share will grow in comparison to producers in states such as Michigan, traditionally the nation's largest producer of cultivated, "high bush" berries.
Growers there are satisfied with plants that produce more than 30,000 pounds of fruit per acre and that never need replanting because they reproduce by sending out shoots.
Researchers at the University of Florida, meanwhile, are "working harder than anybody to come up with new varieties."
These new berries are more flavorful and firm enough to withstand mechanical harvesting, which will cut the cost of paying pickers, often growers' biggest single expense. The new bushes could also increase the typical yield from about 6,000 pounds per acre to 8,000.
Still, Braswell said, "Production-wise we're never going to come close."
Which is why getting berries to market early is the highest priority. When Georgia berries start filling supermarket shelves in May, the price to Florida growers plunges to less than $2 per pound, at which point the growers either let their fruit rot in the fields or open them up to U-pickers.
But early-season berries, such as the ones stored last week on pallets in a gymnasium-sized holding room at the Spiech packinghouse, can bring growers up to $8 per pound. The berries rested in plastic totes called lugs, each one of which pickers at a farm in Hudson had filled with 12 pounds of fruit.
The room is kept at 45 degrees by a refrigeration system that, Tim Spiech said, was the main reason the company moved to Hernando from Tarpon Springs, where it started packing Florida fruit two years ago.
Spiech Farms, which has a long history of packing and marketing blueberries and grapes up North, has contracts with 14 growers in Hernando, Pasco, Citrus and Sumter counties, and expects to process 1 million pounds of fruit this season, Tim Spiech said.
The plant, he said, could easily handle three times that much. And, considering that Spiech Farms' volume has doubled in each of the past two years, he expects it soon will.
A forklift took a pallet load of lugs from the holding room into the windowless, bustling packing room — a few degrees cooler and coolly lit with dim fluorescent bulbs.
A worker spilled the contents of a lug into a trough at the base of a $250,000 packing machine. The fruit dropped through a rushing, fan-generated breeze that blew out twigs, leaves and green berries, which are lighter than ripe ones.
After being carried a few feet farther on a conveyor belt, the main flow of berries dropped onto a row of what looked like small piano keys. These can sense which berries are too soft and activate air jets that blow them, one by one, out of the production line.
"That's cool, but this is really cool," Tim Spiech said, pointing to the next step on the line: infrared sensors set to detect — and reject — berries that are more red than blue.
Eight workers, bundled up in hoodies, then picked out the unripe specimens the machines had missed, ensuring that only ripe, firm berries made it to the end of the line, where they were funneled into clamshells.
These went into cardboard boxes stacked for shipment to the Jewel-Osco supermarket chain in Chicago. Each one of these plastic containers, barely big enough to hold a sandwich, will sell for the early-season premium price of $4.99, and proudly carry the name of Brooksville.
Contact Dan DeWitt at ddewitt@tampabay.com; follow @ddewitttimes.