Where Do Blueberries Grow? A Look at the Global Map

Blueberries grow on every continent except Antarctica, but their story begins in North America, where wild species have thrived for thousands of years in the acidic soils and cool climates of the continent’s forests, barrens, and bogs. From those native stands in Maine and eastern Canada, cultivated blueberries have spread to South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania in barely a century. The speed of that global expansion owes a great deal to plant breeding, creative farming techniques, and a public appetite for the fruit that keeps outpacing supply.

Native Roots in North America

Wild blueberries belong to the genus Vaccinium, a group of shrubby plants that evolved to colonize acidic, nutrient-poor soils across the Northern Hemisphere. The species most people encounter fall into two broad camps. Lowbush blueberries, primarily Vaccinium angustifolium and V. myrtilloides, grow as low ground-cover plants across large managed native stands in Maine in the United States and in the Atlantic and Quebec provinces of Canada.¹ These are not planted in the conventional sense. Farmers manage wild fields by burning or mowing them on a two-year cycle to encourage new growth and fruit production. The berries are small, intensely flavored, and still make up a significant portion of the blueberry harvest in northeastern North America.

Highbush blueberries, particularly V. corymbosum, are the taller, domesticated plants that produce the plump berries you see in grocery stores worldwide. Their domestication is a relatively recent event, and how it happened reshaped the global fruit map.

A Twentieth-Century Domestication

Unlike wheat or apples, which have been cultivated for millennia, the blueberry was a wild fruit well into the 1900s. Its domestication grew out of a collaboration between USDA scientist Frederick V. Coville and New Jersey cranberry grower Elizabeth C. White during the 1910s and 1920s. Coville understood the plant’s unusual soil requirements, and White had the land and horticultural know-how to trial selections from wild populations. Their public-private partnership produced the first commercially viable highbush cultivars and laid the groundwork for today’s global blueberry trade.² Before that effort, blueberries were gathered from the wild. After it, they became a row crop that could be planted, irrigated, and scaled up.

That transition mattered because wild harvest can only grow so far. Managed lowbush fields in Maine and eastern Canada are enormous, but they depend on naturally occurring native stands. Domestication meant blueberries could be moved to entirely new regions, wherever growers could replicate the conditions the plants needed.

What Blueberries Need From the Soil

The single biggest constraint on where blueberries will grow is soil acidity. They perform best in soils with a pH between about 4.0 and 5.5, a range so acidic that most other fruit crops would struggle. This preference traces back to a symbiotic relationship between blueberry roots and specialized fungi called ericoid mycorrhizae. These fungi colonize root cells and help the plant absorb nutrients that would otherwise be locked away in acidic, organic-rich soils.³ Without that fungal partnership, blueberries are poor at scavenging for iron and other micronutrients.

This means you cannot simply plant a blueberry bush in ordinary garden soil and expect results. In regions where the native soil is neutral or alkaline, growers amend beds heavily with sulfur and organic matter, or bypass native soil entirely by growing plants in containers filled with acidified substrate. That container approach has become one of the most important tools for expanding blueberry cultivation into regions that would have been off-limits a generation ago.

Chill Hours and the Climate Puzzle

Beyond soil, blueberries have a temperature requirement that shapes their geography. Most cultivars need a certain number of winter “chill hours,” typically counted as hours below 7°C (about 45°F), to break dormancy and flower properly the following spring. The exact number varies dramatically by cultivar. Research testing dormancy thresholds found that the cultivar Biloxi needs only about 200 chill hours, while others like Tifblue require around 400.⁴ Traditional northern highbush cultivars can need 800 to 1,000 hours or more.

This is why, for most of blueberry history, commercial production was confined to places with cold winters: the northeastern United States, the upper Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of southern Canada. In those zones, chill hours come naturally. The challenge for the rest of the world was finding or breeding cultivars that could get by with less cold.

The North American Heartland

The United States and Canada remain the world’s largest blueberry-producing region. In the U.S., highbush blueberry acreage (including northern and southern highbush as well as rabbiteye types) grew from about 19,800 hectares to 22,400 hectares between 1992 and 2003. At that time, the Midwest accounted for roughly 36 percent of the planted area, followed by the South at 28 percent, New England at 17 percent, and the Western states at 14 percent.⁵ Michigan has long been the single largest highbush-producing state, followed by Oregon, Washington, New Jersey, and Georgia.

Since those figures were compiled, acreage has continued to climb. The overall blueberry area across North America, including lowbush fields, had already increased 30 percent in the decade leading up to 2003, reaching nearly 97,000 hectares.⁵ The expansion has only accelerated since, driven by consumer demand and an industry eager to keep fresh berries available year-round.

How Blueberries Reached the Tropics

The development of southern highbush cultivars, hybrids that cross northern highbush genetics with lower-chill species, opened the door to warmer climates. These plants can set fruit with as few as 150 to 300 chill hours, and some have been pushed into regions where winters barely register. In central Brazil, for instance, researchers have evaluated southern highbush cultivars like Biloxi and Emerald growing under tropical conditions near Brasília, where temperatures rarely drop to anything resembling a temperate winter.⁶

The trick in very warm climates is sometimes to abandon dormancy altogether. An “evergreen” production system keeps plants growing year-round through heavy summer pruning, aggressive leaf-disease management, and constant nitrogen feeding. Under this approach, the bush never enters dormancy, so it never needs chill hours to wake back up. Early data suggested this system could maintain vigorous growth without harming fruit production.⁷ This evergreen model has been instrumental in making blueberries a viable crop in parts of South America, Mexico, and even North Africa and southern Spain, regions where winters are too mild for traditional cultivars.

Chile and Peru have become especially important producers, largely because their harvest season falls during North America’s and Europe’s winter months. That counter-seasonal timing means fresh blueberries can be on store shelves in January and February. Peru’s production growth has been one of the most dramatic agricultural stories of recent decades, jumping from virtually zero to becoming one of the world’s top exporters in about fifteen years.

Europe and Its Own Native Vaccinium

Europe has its own long history with Vaccinium berries, though they are a different species. Bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus) grow wild across Scandinavia, the British Isles, and central European forests. They are smaller and darker than cultivated blueberries, and considerably richer in certain pigment compounds. Analysis of bilberries from seven locations in Slovenia found they contained roughly 1,210 milligrams of anthocyanins per 100 grams of fresh fruit, compared to about 212 milligrams in highbush blueberries from the same country.⁸ That roughly sixfold difference in anthocyanin content is one reason bilberries are prized in European folk food traditions and health markets, though their small size and fragility make commercial-scale harvest difficult.

Cultivated highbush blueberries, the North American species, are now widely grown across Europe as well. Poland, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands have become significant producers. Spain and Portugal, with their mild Mediterranean climates, have leaned into southern highbush varieties that can fruit early in the season and supply northern European markets before domestic crops come in. The growth of European blueberry production has been rapid, though the continent still imports heavily from South America during winter months.

Containers, Tunnels, and Intensive Systems

One of the biggest shifts in how and where blueberries are grown has been the rise of container-based production. Instead of planting bushes directly in the ground, growers place them in pots filled with tailored substrate, typically a mix of peat, coconut coir, and pine bark that maintains the acidic conditions blueberries demand. This approach decouples the crop from native soil conditions entirely. A grower in a limestone region with alkaline soils can produce blueberries in containers just as easily as someone in Maine.

Southern highbush production has been at the forefront of this trend, with innovative practices including container cultivation, evergreen management, high-density planting, and high-tunnel (polytunnel) production all being explored to boost productivity and profitability.⁹ High tunnels protect plants from rain, which reduces fungal disease pressure and gives growers more control over ripening. The combination of containers, tunnels, and evergreen management has allowed blueberries to be profitably grown in places like Morocco, South Africa, and parts of China that would have been unimaginable blueberry regions just twenty years ago.

These intensive systems look very different from the wild lowbush fields of Maine or the traditional in-ground orchards of Michigan. The plants are spaced more densely, managed more precisely, and replaced more frequently. The trade-off is higher upfront cost for potentially higher returns per hectare, along with the ability to time harvests for premium market windows.

Water and Mediterranean-Climate Growing

Blueberries are often thought of as a rain-fed crop from soggy northeastern bogs, but many of the world’s fastest-growing production zones are in semi-arid Mediterranean climates where irrigation is essential. Research in a drip-irrigated blueberry orchard under Mediterranean conditions found that plants given the full estimated water demand and those given about 75 percent of it produced comparable yields of roughly 8.8 to 9.4 kilograms per plant, while the treatment receiving 75 percent used 20 to 27 percent less water overall.⁹ That kind of precision irrigation research matters in regions like central Chile, southern Spain, and parts of California, where water scarcity is a constant concern and blueberry acreage continues to expand.

The takeaway is that blueberries in drier climates are not inherently thirstier than other fruit crops. They do, however, need consistent moisture through the growing season, and their shallow root systems make them sensitive to drought stress in ways that deeper-rooted crops can tolerate.

The Role of Pollinators

Regardless of where in the world they are grown, blueberries depend heavily on insect pollination. The flowers are bell-shaped and require “buzz pollination,” where a bee vibrates its flight muscles at a specific frequency to shake pollen loose. Honeybees can do this to some extent, but bumblebees are considered more efficient pollinators for the task. Research on the cultivar Emerald found it was highly dependent on insect pollination for optimal production and fruit quality, with honeybee pollination producing the highest proportion of fruit set at about 80 percent.¹⁰

This dependence on pollinators adds a geographic consideration that goes beyond soil and temperature. In regions where wild bee populations are abundant, blueberry fields benefit from free pollination services. In areas where managed hives need to be trucked in, as is common in large-scale operations in the Americas and parts of Europe, pollination becomes an additional cost and logistical concern. The global expansion of blueberry farming has created a parallel demand for managed pollinator colonies, linking the fruit’s geography to the health and availability of bee populations.

Getting Berries Around the World

The global blueberry trade relies on the fact that fresh blueberries, while perishable, can be stored and transported reasonably well under the right conditions. Fresh berries are commonly stored and shipped using refrigeration and controlled atmospheres to extend shelf life for extended periods.¹¹ Controlled-atmosphere shipping, which adjusts the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide around the fruit, slows ripening and reduces mold growth.

This technology is what makes the counter-seasonal trade between hemispheres possible. Blueberries harvested in Chile in January can arrive in European or North American supermarkets within days, still firm and shelf-stable. Without cold-chain logistics and modified-atmosphere packaging, the geographic expansion of blueberry farming would matter far less, because the fruit would spoil before reaching distant consumers. The result is something that would have puzzled a fruit buyer even forty years ago: fresh blueberries available in every month of the year, sourced from whichever hemisphere is currently in its harvest window.

Climate Change and the Shifting Map

The geography of blueberry production is not static, and climate change is actively reshaping it. The central threat for traditional growing regions is the loss of winter chill. Modeling based on 20 global climate models projects that by mid-century, a key blueberry production area in the southeastern United States could see chill hours drop by about two-thirds compared to the 1981-2000 historical period. Chilling portions, a related but more refined measure, could fall by nearly half.¹² That is a dramatic reduction. Rabbiteye blueberry cultivars, which are major crops in Georgia and other southeastern states, would face increasingly unreliable dormancy release, leading to erratic flowering and reduced yields.

The projections also showed a delayed onset and shortened duration of the chilling season, meaning winters would not only be warmer but would effectively start later and end earlier from the plant’s perspective.¹² For growers in these regions, adaptive strategies include switching to lower-chill cultivars, adopting the evergreen management system described earlier, or in some cases relocating production to higher elevations or latitudes where chill hours remain adequate.

At the same time, warming is opening new territory. Parts of northern Europe, Scandinavia, and Canada that were previously too cold for reliable production may become increasingly suitable. And for the intensive container-based operations that already manage their plants’ environments tightly, the loss of natural chill hours is a solvable problem: growers can use cold-storage facilities to artificially chill dormant plants before setting them back out in tunnels. Whether these adaptations can keep pace with the rate of climate change remains an open question, but the blueberry industry’s track record of innovation suggests it will keep looking for answers.

Why Blueberry Geography Keeps Expanding

A few decades ago, a map of blueberry production would have shown a tight cluster in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, with smaller dots in Michigan, Oregon, and a handful of other states. Today that map includes every inhabited continent. The combination of low-chill breeding, container growing systems, evergreen management for warm climates, and cold-chain logistics has turned what was once a regional North American wild fruit into a globally traded commodity. China has become a major producer and consumer. Morocco grows blueberries for European markets. Australia and New Zealand supply premium berries to Asian buyers during the Southern Hemisphere season.

What has not changed is the plant’s fundamental biology. Blueberries still need acidic conditions around their roots, reliable pollination by insects, and either adequate winter chill or a management system that sidesteps the requirement. Every new growing region that comes online has to solve those same problems. The solutions just keep getting more creative.