Wayne Phillips, a Navy pensioner and local boy, helps John with the winter pruning and other fieldwork. After most of a lifetime working in conventional blueberry and cranberry production, Wayne is happy to be working on an organic farm.

"Twenty minutes after the plane came through" for aerial spraying, he recalls, "you'd see dead snakes, dead frogs, dead fish in the irrigation pond, dead turtles--they'd all be belly up." "Most people have no idea" what gets sprayed on conventional berries, agrees John Marchese--products like lanate, captan, malathion.