The Farm Friday update we’ve all been waiting for!🍒 Hawkins Gebbers walks us through the incredibly careful and efficient cherry harvest process.
Video Transcript:
“Hey guys, it’s Hawkins. I got you here on a Farm Friday. It’s June 24th and it has been a long wait this spring till we could pick, but we’re finally starting to get going. Come check out the fruit. Man, this year has been a wait but it is worth it. Look at the quality of these cherries. This is just gonna be a banner year for quality and we have to pick every cherry by the stem.
Three by three, two by two, one by one. But just look at the quality this year! Our team’s out here picking a hundred miles an hour but every cherry gets picked by the stem and gently. Let me introduce you to how we get these cherries picked into the packing shed in the tiniest amount of time. So we work in teams of about 20. They each pick a bucket, 20 buckets per bin, and we gently dump the buckets into the bins.
All right, bins come out one by one with a tractor and are loaded by sevens with an orange machine to hustle to the patio. So once the cherries make it to the patio we got to keep them wet, we got to keep them cold. And because we’re a contiguous ranch here at Gebbers, we’ll have these to the hydro coolers probably within 30 to 45 minutes. All right time to load them up!
It’s carried safely home to the hydro coolers. So that’s all for this week but next week we might look at cold chain management, we might look at some of our yellow cherry harvest. They’re really coming along with high sugar. Maybe we’ll check that out.”
