"It Really Is a Wonderland"

IF DEMARCO HAD LIVED OUT HIS CHILDHOOD dreams, he would have become an archaeologist or a priest. Instead, he became the third-largest cranberry farmer in the United States. “It’s not something that I had planned, but fate intervened,” he says. DeMarco grew up in Hammonton, New Jersey. His father, a pharmacist by training, bought and sold produce and ran a large produce trucking business. He was also fascinated by cranberry bogs. DeMarco spent his summers working for his father, “but the business did not interest me at all,” he says. Af- ter Dartmouth and Yale, where he earned a J.D., his dad offered DeMarco a job straightening out the complicated titles to the family properties. He planned to take the bar exam in the winter of 1964, but his father’s death in an auto accident in December 1964 “changed everything right then and there,” he says.

DeMarco was 26 when he took the reins of the fam- ily’s 4,000-acre farm and business. He grew the company into one of the largest cranberry operations in the world, boosting production from 25,000 barrels in the final year of his father’s life to around 170,000 barrels a year. When DeMarco describes the Pinelands property, he speaks of the seemingly endless, cloud-filled sky, lakes and brooks running across the land, herds of deer moving through with bald eagles flying overhead, and fields of green dotted with bright red cranberries at harvest time. Everything is quiet: “It really is a wonderland,” he says. In 2003 DeMarco sold the nearly 10,000-acre preserve, valued at $24 million, to the New Jersey Conservation Foundation for $12 million. “If these lands are lost, they’re lost forever. I think conser- vation is very, very important from the point of view of wildlife conservation and overall aesthetics—the beauty of it. I’m really happy people can enjoy this.”

“I’ve always considered myself a citizen of the Pinelands,” says the former cranberry tycoon.