Cranberry Harvest

Details

Description

Scenes from the fall cranberry harvest at the bogs at the White Eagle Parcel of Aucoot Woods in Marion, Massachusetts. The bogs are part of the Sippican Lands Trust, but are farmed by an outside contractor.

The process depicted here is wet harvesting: the bogs are flooded, then tractors with water reels (sometimes called "egg beaters" because they churn the water in much the same way) are driven over the flooded bogs. These agitate the water, breaking the berries loose from the plant. Since the berries have internal air pockets, they float to the surface. They are then collected up with booms, and pumped out of the bog into equipment that separates the berries from other plant material mixed in with them, into a waiting truck. Berries harvested in this way can't be sold as fresh fruit, so these will become juice, sauce, or dried sweetened cranberries.

Berries to be sold as fresh fruit are harvested "dry", with equipment that rakes or combs the berries off of the plants.

I talked a bit with the person running the show on this particular day, and it sounded like these berries were destined for Decas Cranberries, a long-time local berry producer.

A few checks with my GIS software and some very, very rough back-of-a-napkin math showed that these berries, when floating, made a layer of berries three and a quarter acres in size, probably in the neighborhood of at least 80 million cranberries, quite likely more. That's a whole lot of sauce.