How are cranberries picked?
Back in the “old days,” cranberries were picked by hand using various types of “scoops.” People would often have heavy wooden and metal scoops with teeth and would “swipe” into the cranberries, lifting up to have the cranberries drop into the scoop. This was, and still is, hard demanding work. Today, the vast majority of cranberries are picked by flooding the bogs and having machines beat the cranberries off the vines. Cranberries float, so once they are taken off the vine, they float to the surface and then are gathered and placed into trucks and sent to the processing plant. There is a very small percentage of farms that still pick the cranberries when the bogs are “dry” – not using the flooding technique. American Cranberry Company obtains all of their cranberries from these select farms. These farms use special machines that scoop up the berries and puts them into big burlap bags. These bags are then taken off the machine and they are dumped into large bins. The bins are then taken
