Silent Spring at 60: Assessing environmentalism in the cranberry treadmill of production in Massachusetts

While the Massachusetts cranberry industry is in many ways a quintessential "agricultural treadmill," recent decades have seen a shift in the industry toward adopting environmental concerns, beginning roughly with Rachel Carson and other influential scientists critical of unfettered chemical use in cranberry production. Sixty years after the publication of Silent Spring is an opportune moment to assess the impact of environmentalist pressures on the messaging of powerful organizational actors in the cranberry industry, especially the influential UMass Cranberry Station, an outreach program of UMass Extension. Using a mixed methods approach, we examine their Newsletter to evaluate its treatment of environmental topics and non-chemical growing methods over time. Additionally, we gathered survey data from over 90 growers and in-depth interview data from 17 of them to better understand how growers experience the agricultural treadmill, especially regarding synthetic agrichemical use. Newsletter data reveal that while Extension, in the area of cranberry production, has indeed increased its environmentally friendly discourse, statistical analysis of survey data shows that agrichemical use continues to expand, thus supporting the treadmill theory. In-depth interview data further document the cran-berry industry as suffering from overproduction and reflecting a treadmill of both chemicals and pollination problems. We conclude that if the cranberry industry is to move away from agricultural treadmill tendencies, the UMass Extension Cranberry Station must provide stronger direction for growers seeking to create less input -dependent and more ecologically integrated cranberry systems. Given the chemical-intensive nature of the cranberry agricultural treadmill, however, this will likely be an uphill battle.