>> We're Cutler Cranberry Company, and we have about 700 acres of cranberries in the ground. Cranberries have four hollow chambers inside them. If you break one open, you can see the four air pockets inside. That's what enables us to harvest them this way. They can float in the water. We use this floating corral boom to corral the berries down to one corner of the bed. Then we have a spray bar that goes out into the water and sprays the berries and the water, and any leaves or other trash up into a tube that then separates the berries from the water and the trash, and then we can put the berries into our trucks and the trash into our trash truck. The water goes back into the bed where it came from. A place for everything.
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My great-great-great grandfather was one of the pioneers of cranberry growing here in Wisconsin. This photo here shows four generations of the Potters. This on the far left here is Guy Potter, my great-great-great grandfather, who bought this marsh in 1923. His son, Roland. His son Bruce, who's my grandfather. This is my dad, Martin, and one of his brothers, Joe. It's one of only three fruits native to North America. The cranberry, the blueberry, and the concord grape. A common misconception is that cranberries grow in water. They actually don't grow in water. They grow in very sandy soils. But you can see here, it's a perennial vine growth. So once these plants are planted, they can last pretty much indefinitely. We have beds that are over 80 years old. They would grow naturally and people would just hand pick them out in the swampy, marshy areas. From there, people began to dig ditches around there so they could better control the water movement in and out of the beds. That's kind of how cranberry growing got started here in Wisconsin. Looking back historically, Native Americans used the cranberries when they found them growing wild for lots of different things. Other than food, they used them for medicine. They used the cranberry juice for dye. >> I was born in Black River Falls. I moved around with my folks, here and there, wherever they could make their living. Pick blueberries and strawberries. Then in the fall, we'd come to cranberry marshes. That's where I got started raking cranberries by hand. It's pretty hard on the back. You'd stoop down to reach the berries. At first, we used to rake 10 hours a day. After a while, they cut it down to eight hours. Even that is too long, too hard. We worked like a horse, a mule.
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I think we had to do it to earn our living. >> This self-propelled mechanical harvester has long metal fingers that pull the floating berries off the plant. >> Probably the biggest change was going from hand harvesting to mechanical harvesting of cranberries, which was in the early 1950s. It enabled growers to pick a lot more cranberries, and they could therefore expand their marshes and have more acres of cranberries. Around that same time, cranberry juice cocktail came around. So that greatly expanded the consumer demand for cranberries. Before then, it was mainly fresh cranberries, or cranberry sauce, were the two big products. So I think it was kind of a combination of those things that really helped the cranberry industry explode. >> It takes a berry with a bounce to get by this machine. Bad berries won't bounce, so they fall straight down and are culled out... >> Cranberry growers are very innovative. You can't go to the implement dealer and buy a cranberry harvester. So everybody kind of builds their machines a little bit differently. We share ideas freely and kind of build what fits our beds best. This machine, it's a standard tractor that we built harrows on the front and back. Basically, the tines are bent at an angle, and when they go down into the water, they shake, and that's what knocks the berries loose off the vine. This new machine is more gentle on the plants. >> Sharp eyes and skilled hands pick out any poorly colored berries that are left... >> Everything used to be hand sorted and packed by hand. They did have bagger machines, but everything else was done by hand. Now, we've really come so far in being able to do a lot of things electronically, and have machines to help us get the job done more quickly and more efficiently. Wisconsin currently grows over half the nation's cranberries. We've been the number one cranberry producing state for 18 years now. This is the 18th year, so we're quite proud of that. Over half the cranberries that are eaten around the world come from Wisconsin.
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