The Wild Blueberry Harvest
August into September is a special time of great activity. The season lasts from four to six weeks, and the berries must be harvest during fine weather while they are dry.
It coincides with school holidays, so many school children and students are able to work on the blueberry fields and earn a good wage.
Plenty of blueberry farms still rely on hand rakers who are paid for piece according to the weight or volume they harvest.
Some pick into a standard box or basket and this is the unit by which they are paid.
Crew bosses supervise the operation in the field and are paid according to the weight picked by the rakers under their charge.
Machine harvesting has become the norm on blueberry barrens or large, relatively level fields with sufficient acreage to justify the capital expenditure. This has been possible since the 1980s when the removal of weeds using herbicides became de rigueur.
All sort of machine have been tried.
One of the most successful and widely accepted of these larger machines is the Bragg harvester.
Mounted alongside a tractor, this harvester operates on the same raking or combing principles as the hand held rakes. It needs just one skilled tractor driver to operate it.
These harvesters enable blueberry growers to harvest their crops more economically and are invaluable where it is difficult to find sufficient people willing and able to harvest the crop by hand for as mutually agreeable rate of pay.
These machines have, however left a large number of Native American workers without their traditional summer jobs.
Most wild blueberries are grown in areas that also rely heavily on tourism especially in Maine. The harvest provides a time of celebration for tourist and local communities alike.
There are blueberry festivals which have a carnival atmosphere with games, procession and other entertainments.
Individual quick frozen (IQF) berries are frozen as they pass though a tunnel though which freezing air pumped as the berries are blown through.
By the time fruit reaches the end of the tunnel it is frozen. From this stage the fruit is either packed ungraded or it is color sorted to remove those that are unripe or other impurities.
Modern laser technology is being used to remove over 99 percent of unwanted material and can cope with more than 8,000 Lbs. (3,600 kg) an hour passing down the line.
Rejected fruit is blown out by a steam of air form a jet ejector, which is activated as the laser detects it.
IQF fruit has a shelf life of two years when stored in a suitable freezer. Bulk freezing of clean-washed, air dried fruit without using IQF methods results in a pack with mixed quality fruit, much of which has frozen as a mass instead of an individual berries, but it is suitable for sale to some processors for juice production.
The Wild Blueberry Harvest
