Tag Archives: 2012 harvest

Harvesting results

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Pine Island Cranberry was fortunate to have escaped Hurricane Sandy unscathed. We stored all of our tall equipment (elevators, et cetera) or sheltered it as best we could. Total rainfall over the course of the storm was only an average of 4.5 inches. Our team was out pulling all the boards and lowering all the reservoirs, so we had no flooding problems at all. There are some trees down, and we did use one lift pump in order to redirect some of the water and spread it out a little, but overall we “weathered” the storm and kept everything intact!

Considering our worries after Isaac, our harvest also turned out well. Overall, 48% of our acreage was affected, with 35% of our farm was under water and an additional 13% troubled by high flood waters moving through. Despite the worry, our teams finished on Saturday, working at top speed to get everything in, and brought in the third largest crop in the history of Pine Island Cranberry: almost 30 million pounds!

The three harvest crews did an amazing job: we had one new team leader and two new crew leaders learning on the job, and together with our more experienced leaders and team members finished the harvest in 35 days, averaging almost 40 acres a day! That’s in addition to all the time everyone put in during the storm as well as the massive cleanup effort afterward. Pine Island employees truly strive to do everything they do better every day, and the care and attention they show is extraordinary.

Pine Island Cranberry broke several personal records, in fact. 12 bogs on the main farm and 7 at Sim Place broke previous harvest records. Sim Place itself (even with 2 harvested bogs that had to be thrown out entirely and 84 acres under water for up to 72 hours after the Labor Day storm) harvested a record crop. 56% of our Sim Place property was under water after the storm, and yet we managed over 3.2 million pounds of cranberries brought in from Sim Place alone.

Nor were the knocking and gathering teams the only ones breaking records. This season, we had a record number of barrels delivered out of the packing house in one day: over 14,000 barrels, or 1.4 million pounds!

It has long been Bill’s central philosophy that at Pine Island Cranberry we are growers: it’s what we do and who we are. Our team members pride themselves on doing our best, never quitting, and loving what they do. And it is at times like this, at the end of a long, tough season, that we see what we are made of, what we have accomplished, and what we can accomplish moving forward. It’s how we work to become the best at what we do.

Packing House

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about water management, the picking crew, and the gathering crew. The final step before the Ocean Spray receiving station in Chatsworth is our packing house. This process, unlike the previous, really is as simple as it seems. It is, however, a continuous process, and relies on constant communication between the team leaders and the packing house team, as well as between the packing house and the receiving station.

Each team on the bogs has been assigned a color: Orange, Blue, or Green. In order to properly track each team’s production, their bogs are assigned a different section on the packing house platform.

Each bog is run through the blowers separately. When a new bog is started, the first load from the new bog has a post-it note attached to it with our Exhibit A number, or bog identification number. It is the team leader’s responsibility every day to let Mike Guest, our facilities supervisor, know what their plan for the day is and to keep him informed of any problems that might occur during the day.

“We switched to this new system back in 1999,” Mike says. “It’s actually a lot easier and I think works better.”

First, the forklift crew, led by Joan Dominguez, unload the full cranberry boxes from the trucks coming out of the field. If the boxes are coming from the bog that Mike is sending through the blowers, then the forklift crew will dump the cranberries from those boxes into the hoppers. If Mike is not running that particular bog the forklift crew will stack the boxes in the appropriate spot for that crew on the platform.

Once the cranberries are poured into the hoppers, they pass along the belt through the blowers, which are used to partially dry the fruit and remove as many of the leaves as possible.

These leaves are collected throughout the day and sold to local blueberry growers; when Pine Island still had a blueberry operation, we used this to mulch our blueberry fields. Nothing is ever wasted!

Once the leaves are blown out, the fruit drops onto another belt and from there move up the truck elevator into the waiting trailer.

Team member Harry Mick keeps the loading moving; he signals our drivers, Candido Rivera and Josue Rodriguez, to keep the trailer inching forward as each section is filled with fruit. It is then his task to halt the line when the trailer is full or the bog is finished in order to bring the next waiting trailer forward.

While all of this is going on, other team members are busy rinsing off the belts in order to keep the equipment as debris-free as possible. They also take advantage of pauses in loading to sweep up the extras and push them toward the debris pile. In addition, everyone pitches in when necessary to clear out the hoppers, which occasionally can get jammed. The last box out of a bog usually has a lot of leaves, grass, and other bog debris, and can clog the line and cause hold-ups both here and at the receiving station if we do not take care of it immediately. Therefore, the constant washing of the equipment and attention to detail by the packing house crew help keep our harvest running.

While all of this is going on, trucks from the Blue, Green, and Orange teams are coming and going, keeping our forklift operators busy!

“It can get tough when we have a lot of fruit coming in, because we can only get the trailers out so fast,” Mike says. “But everyone hustles, and everyone helps, and we do what we need to get done.”

Gathering

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Last week we went into a bog with one of our picking crews. The next step is one of the most beautiful (and heavily photographed) sights of the harvest every year: gathering the crop. But as with everything related to the harvest, it’s not as simple as our well-trained team makes it look.

An afternoon spent with Tug Haines’ Blue Team at Red Road shows just how much work goes into the second part of the harvesting process. It can be more difficult in some places than others, depending on terrain. “Sometimes the ground is uneven,” Tug says. “The boom has a chain weight underneath, but if the ground is high enough the boom can push back and some fruit escapes.” This is less of a problem with bogs that have been renovated, since the beds are completely level.

Once the knocking machines leave the bog, it’s time to put the boom in. It’s not always necessary to get more than one or two people into the water for this part, but on this particular bog system there are several trees lining one edge, so the gathering crew, led by Kelvin Colon, need to get into the bog and do this by hand.

Each end is then attached to a tractor, which slowly moves along the dam, corralling the berries. Some members of the gathering crew follow alongside, “sweeping” the berries and making sure they stay within bounds. “There’s a trick to it,” Tug says. “It looks really simple but it’s tough to get the hang of it; a lot of guys want to move quickly but it actually gets done faster if you slow down. You only move as fast as the tractor; your body should be slow but your arms should move fast.” Once that is done, both ends of the boom are connected to the boom reel, which is wound ever tighter as the berries are brought up the elevator onto the truck.

While part of the crew is pulling the boom ever tighter, the other part of the crew are setting up the elevator in order to remove the berries from the water and load the trucks bound for the packing house. There are two parts to the elevator: the bed elevator, which is the part that runs into the bog, and the truck elevator, which is the part that leads up to the truck.

As the bed elevator is lowered into the water, someone is there to connect it to the sprayer, which uses the water to help push the berries up to the elevator.

Once all of this is done, it’s time to start moving the berries into the trucks, which have been lined up and are waiting for the set-up to be finished. As each truck pulls up, a crew member jumps up top and makes sure the load is level and that no berries are lost. Kelvin, the Blue Team gathering crew leader, explains, “We get a board to cover the top of the trucks because the two boxes on the back are separate; it keeps the berries from falling between.”

Communication is key with this endeavor; the crew member standing on the truck has to signal both the drivers and the crew members in the water when to stop and when to start. Kelvin’s job is to oversee all of this; he needs to keep the crew and the trucks moving, makes sure that no berries are escaping the boom, makes sure that the crew is pushing berries away. He needs to keep the berries evenly distributed among the boxes on the trucks. Once they’re down to about ten boxes, Tug will start letting the water out. The trick there is not to raise it too high for the pickers in the next bog.

Vincent Arnwine, a new team member who started just before harvest, is visibly impressed by the teamwork involved. “Last week, some of the guys on the picking crew pitched in to help us finish at the end of the day. It’s really cool to work at a place where everyone is willing to do what needs to be done; nobody’s above doing something and no one is afraid of hard work.”

This attention to detail and willingness to step up to the plate shows: our Blue Team has finished the Sim Place portion of the harvest, and despite the flooding and other weather-related setbacks, Sim Place has set a new record. Pine Island Cranberry is proud of every single member of our entire team, who have worked so hard in the past weeks to help get us all here.

Water Harvesting

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Everyone is familiar with the sight of cranberry bogs in the fall; people remain fascinated by the spectacle. It is always one of the most poetic descriptions in a newspaper or blog story. But the reality is much more complex; running a picking crew is a carefully choreographed dance that requires both strength and skill to manage.

Rick Zapata, our Green Team crew leader, has been running a picking crew for years. “There’s a lot to think about,” he says. “It’s not as easy as just putting the machines in the water.” There’s a method to it in order to keep from damaging the fruit or the vines. The difficulty fluctuates slightly due to bog size, weeds, and terrain, as well as other variables such as water levels, crop size, and even berry variety, as newer varieties typically have a greater yield. Rick also points out that some berries do not float to the surface as easily and remain under the vine canopy, which is why they stagger machines in the water in order to both maximize yield and minimize damage to the vines.

Each bog is picked in a specific pattern according to terrain, and the picking crew has to carefully move their harvesters around stakes which have been arranged by the team leader for maximum operational efficiency. Following this pattern allows for minimal damage to the vines. Rick also needs to stay ahead of his crew and check for ditches, for everyone’s safety. “It’s easier on newer bogs; they’re more uniform,” he says. “But after a while you get to know your own section and you understand how it goes.”

The picking crew leaders are also tasked with making sure the machines have enough fuel. The machines usually hold enough fuel for about four hours of picking, so the crew leader needs to make sure that their crew has an adequate supply to maintain their harvesters.

The basic process actually is fairly simple: water reels, or “beaters” are used to stir up the water in the bogs. The berries are dislodged, or “knocked”, from the vines and float to the surface of the water. The machines are slowly rolled into the water and the wheels are lined up against each other, but not in a straight line. Initially, Rick will walk the bog ahead of the edge harvester, which is smaller and lighter than the other harvesting machines in order to maneuver more easily near the ditches. In this particular bog (Champion B, a 6.5 acre bog planted with Early Blacks), the bog is divided into sections outlined by the irrigation ditches, and the picking crew will complete picking each section before they move on to the next.

Teamwork is important while in the middle of the bog. Rick has been working with the same picking team for about three or four years, and they all know what they need to do when they need to do it. “If I have to get out of the bog for any reason at all, I can trust any one of them to take the lead until I get back,” Rick says. For instance, he turned the reins over to Jose Hernandez-Vargas, asking him to lead the crew around the section while he stepped out to remove the ramps from the entry point and bring them over to the unpicked section to make it easier to cross the ditch. The crew didn’t miss a beat!

Our team works in all kinds of weather, rain or shine. The only thing to get them out of the water is lightning. And if the picking crew gets ahead of the gathering crew, they’ll take care of some of the odd jobs such as staking, removing sprinklers, or cleaning out the leaves from finished bogs…as always, doing whatever it takes to make Pine Island Cranberry the best at what we do!