COLUMBIA (AP) – Maine’s wild blueberry crop last year rebounded from 2004 but still fell short of the industry’s midseason predictions and the state’s five-year average harvest.

The state’s blueberry growers last year harvested 58.5 million pounds, according to a year-end report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The harvest was 27 percent higher than the 2004 crop of 46 million pounds, the worst harvest in a decade.

But it still came in short of the 70 million pounds that growers were hopeful of getting last summer before the harvest began. It also fell short of the state’s five-year average of 64.5 million pounds.

Agriculture officials said the crop was hurt by last spring’s heavy rains, which were followed by a lack of rain during the summer.

“You had a cool, wet spring that brought about the disease conditions and delayed the bloom by one or two weeks,” said John Miyares, a USDA statistician. “Then there was the dry summer, just when we needed a good rainfall in August. That lack of rain in July really put a lot of stress on the harvest.”

While the production was down, it looks like the price for processed blueberries will be up for the year.

Although the numbers are preliminary for now, the National Agricultural Statistics Service anticipates that the selling price will be 60 cents a pound for processed berries – the highest price in about a decade.

The price is high largely because the 2004 crop was so poor, resulting in a decline in blueberry stocks in cold storage, officials say.

The value of the 2005 processed berry crop is estimated at $34.9 million, which is nearly 70 percent higher than the value of the 2004 processed crop, which brought in $20.6 million, according to official figures.