Welcome back to another Farm Friday with Hawkins Gebbers! In this video, he uses a recent storm to show and explain how we use helicopters to protect cherries from rain water.
Video Transcript:
“Hey it’s Hawkins with Farm Friday. I want to give you a quick update. So this is a cool opportunity to show you how we protect the cherries with our helicopters. That rainstorm just passed through and we’re going to check right here to see if We’ve got too much water in these cherries. This is a Chelan variety and it’s within two to five days of harvest depending on where you’re at in this valley. But you can see the water on them, so that’s distilled rain water. And cherry is a high sugar fruit and it has a very permeable skin. So the osmosis will pull that water in with high pressure and that water will swell this cherry until it splits and cracks. And that crack will get bigger and bigger and bigger. So what we’re going to do here in a minute is show you how we dry these cherries off with a helicopter. So stay tuned. The peak of our drying protection season for rain we’ll fly with 14 in-house or owned helicopters and we’ll contract five or six so at any given time we could be flying with almost 20 helicopters. We have like 20 or 30 guys involved in the process.
Probably 8 or 10 guys with these helicopter radios. You can take more than one helicopter at a time. It’s quite the process and man it is there’s a lot of danger to it a lot of risk. And before we start drying I love to ask God for protection, I mean for the pilots and the ground guys.
Let’s see what this helicopter can do. The goal is to knock off a little bit of volume of this water.
We’re very careful to dry at a certain height, certain speed to just knock the water off but not bruise the fruit up. And I’ll show you what we came up with now that we have a little bit of natural air.
I mean this fruit’s almost all the way dry!”
