Cranberry Harvest

We wake up in the morning as the fields are being flooded for the cranberry harvest. The flooding has been going on for 2 days now and has reached the level where the beaters will go in and knock off the berries from their vines.








Here is one of the beaters moving back and forth over the field and you can see many many cranberries floating on the surface.






The breeze has moved the floating cranberries to one corner of the field. It is this breeze which decides where we will move the equipment to extract the berries from the field into the trucks to transport them to the receiving site in Richmond.

The men then lay out booms and begin to move the berries toward the receiving auger that pumps them into the trucks.


The cranberries are building up to several inches deep now and a bit difficult to pull.



Here we have 2 foremen keeping a keen watch on the workings making sure no mistakes occur.


As the berries get loaded into the trucks they are washed with jets of water to eliminate junk that was floating in with them such as sticks, chaff, grass clippings etc. This junk gets pumped into this truck for removal.


In the background of this photo you can see the lift that pulls the berries up to the truck and in the foreground is a tractor running a pump for the water jets.


The cranberries going into the delivery truck.


A close up photo of the cranberries


This series of photos on the cranberry harvest concludes my "Life on an Organic Farm" web blog attached to my web page for 2008. Watch for our next series on our travels to Mainland Mexico when we depart Yuma Arizona around November 3rd.

Larry and Betty