Cranberry harvesting is in full swing
Crews wade into a sea of floating cranberries to corral the berries using a large rubber tube. Photos by Christian Uva
After being sucked into the pump truck, the berries are piled up in a semi-truck.
Jake Arnold said the pickers drive a simple path around the bogs: "You go straight and turn left, go straight and turn left."
Two signs that fall is here: The leaves turn red and orange, and the cranberries are ready to harvest.
A picker cruises through a bog.
A crew member uses a shovel-like tool to guide the berries toward the collection box that will suck them up and bring them to the pump truck.
The tubes used to corral the berries are quite large and heavy.
A crew member brings the collection box into the bog to be staked down.
The pump truck operator guides the berries into the semi-truck and keeps the piles even.
Large spikes on the pickers help pull the berries off the vine and bring them floating to the surface.
The bog complex is just off Farm to Table Road.
Crews wade into a sea of floating cranberries to corral the berries using a large rubber tube. Photos by Christian Uva
After being sucked into the pump truck, the berries are piled up in a semi-truck.
Jake Arnold said the pickers drive a simple path around the bogs: "You go straight and turn left, go straight and turn left."
Two signs that fall is here: The leaves turn red and orange, and the cranberries are ready to harvest.
A picker cruises through a bog.
A crew member uses a shovel-like tool to guide the berries toward the collection box that will suck them up and bring them to the pump truck.
The tubes used to corral the berries are quite large and heavy.
A crew member brings the collection box into the bog to be staked down.
The pump truck operator guides the berries into the semi-truck and keeps the piles even.
Large spikes on the pickers help pull the berries off the vine and bring them floating to the surface.
The bog complex is just off Farm to Table Road.
It’s harvest season — not just for crops, but also for cranberries.
Since late September, picker machines have cruised bogs, and crews have collected thousands of berries.
A.D. Makepeace Company, one of the largest cranberry growers in Wareham, took Wareham Week behind the scenes to see how they harvest their berries.
Makepeace’s Hogan-Fisher bog complex offered views of every stage of the harvesting process before a backdrop of deciduous trees with leaves of all colors. Some bogs sat dried up, others flooded to waist height.
Makepeace operates 1,625 acres of cranberry bogs across Wareham, Carver and Plymouth, Vice President of Marketing and Communications Linda Burke said. But not all are active at once. They give some bogs a year off to recover from the damage caused by machines driving over the vines.
Foreman Jake Arnold said they try to avoid driving on the bogs as much as possible to protect the plants. That’s why they use helicopters — and now drones — to fertilize the plants before the harvest.
When the bogs are ready, they’re flooded with about six inches of water. Pumps bring water from an on-site reservoir and then move the water to the next bog when it’s ready, creating a closed-loop cycle.
Once flooded, multiple pickers drive over the bogs to pull the berries over the vines. Arnold, who’s working his sixth harvest with Makepeace, said they drive in circles. “You go straight and turn left, go straight and turn left,” he said.
He said it’s kind of like being a NASCAR driver, but not as fast.
All the pickers are built in-house by Makepeace maintenance workers. Since cranberry growing is such a small industry, no companies make machines to do the specific tasks they need. “Everything in cranberry is custom-built,” Arnold said.
Another one of these custom-built machines is the pump truck, which sucks cranberries out of the water and drops them in a semi-truck.
These berries are pumped after the bog is flooded with over two feet of water. Crews wade into the bog and corral the berries into piles using large rubber tubes, a process called racking.
They stake a large metal box, reminiscent of a Ghostbuster’s trap for ghosts, into the ground to collect the berries.
Once it’s all ready, an operator flips a switch and the berries go up.
Leaves and bramble are cleaned off the cranberries and dumped into another truck.
The berries stack up quickly in the semi-truck. The driver needs to move up frequently so the stack stays low.
Once the truck is full, it drives to an Ocean Spray facility in Carver, which Burke said is Makepeace’s only customer. Cranberry growing continues to be a local affair for them: Burke said all their bogs are in Southeastern Massachusetts.
