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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 cranberry 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. • Analyze: 1) Extension newsletters; 2) semi-structured interviews with cranberry growers; 3) survey data of chemical use. • Due to environmentalist pressures Extension has augmented its usage of discourse to support the environment over time. • Growers experience the treadmill through overproduction, problems with chemical inputs, and the pollination treadmill. • Surveys suggest that agri-chemical usage has nonetheless increased despite increases in environmental discourse. • Extension should offer the socio-ecological expertise necessary to achieve meaningful agri-chemical use reductions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cranberry, a commodity of social, cultural, and economic importance to New England, is under threat due to climatic change in this region of the United States. Yet, previous research reveals that cranberry growers have mixed attitudes about the anthropogenic roots of climate change, with many being skeptical. Building on the researchers' analysis of the personal and ecological conditions that affect climate change attitudes among cranberry growers, this paper examines the effect that key actors in the growers' social networks have on those attitudes. Through statistical analysis of survey data and content analysis of two important cranberry newsletters, the paper finds that cranberry growers' perceived importance of two key cranberry growing institutions, the "sociopolitically focused" Cape Cod Cranberry Growers' Association and the "technically focused" University of Massachusetts Cranberry Station, as well as connections to other cranberry growers, is associated in nuanced ways with growers' climate change attitudes. Drawing on the sociological theory of "social capital," the paper examines how these social ties to key actors/institutions may result in greater threat perception or worry about climate change. It then considers how "green ties," if harnessed and supported by these important actors in the cranberry grower network, might significantly mitigate climate change in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cranberry growers in New England are increasingly pressured by negative effects associated with global climate change, some of which are familiar to this group (such as precipitation fluctuations and pest pressures), others that are rather new (such as warmer winters that threaten needed chill hours for the plants to bloom). The first study of this population of its kind, we use a survey, supplemented with observations and interviews, to assess Massachusetts cranberry grower attitudes towards climate change, and whether certain conditions of production might be associated with their attitudes. Our findings suggest that certain personal and ecological conditions are associated with greater worry of climate change effects, and that communal conditions of the cranberry grower social network provide some ways to cope with a warming climate. While the cranberry growing community has created a strong social network that has allowed it to sustain production, a warming planet will likely require significant change in order to overcome general attitudes of climate skepticism so that cranberry production may continue in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The original article has been corrected. Unfortunately the name of the second author was misspelled. This has been corrected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]