It’s been a tough winter at Pine Island Cranberry (and almost everywhere else), which has done a number on our dams. On a cranberry farm, dams serve two purposes: to detain the water used for irrigation and water management, and for vehicle use. Dam maintenance is highly important for both safety and equipment. Most of the year, our team will “scrape” the dams as necessary in order to save wear and tear on equipment. Then, in the spring, we target the ones that need crowning.

Until this year, the process to scrape crowned dams was completed by a dozer, which meant each dam had to be gone over twice, just to make sure the crown was not scraped off. This year we decided to maximize our efficiency and commissioned Hollyford Enterprises in Hainesport to build us a new scraper to use on crowned dams. In addition, we’d like to modify it for land-leveling in renovation projects. Owner Bob Shinn based the design off our current scraper and made some adjustments for both flexibility and durability. “It turned out to be a bigger project than I expected,” Bob says, “but the final result is meaningful.”

This week, team member Ivan Burgos took the scraper out for a test run!

He towed it up to the top of the Black Rock system in order to see how it handled and to test some of the new features Bob had designed.

GM Fred Torres says, “We wanted to check for any adjustments that might need to be made to the hydraulics as well as testing it on different types of gravel. It went through both the soft sand at Black Rock and the harder gravel up at Jonathan Wright without any issues. The adjustable extensions on the back are fantastic for scraping the wider dams and will save us time and money when we start crowning later in the year.” The extensions are going to be very useful; they can be extended to cover the widest possible area, then pulled in when going through a gate or driving on a dam lined by utility poles and no one will have to swerve around the obstacle or double back to get the edge. And it’s pretty cool to watch!

“It’s pretty easy to run,” Ivan says. “You just have to be careful and remember to pull the extensions back in. That might take some getting used to!”