Cran-tastic harvest bodes well for holidays

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Story Published: Oct 12, 2009 at 4:28 PM PST

By Kristina Nelson, KCBY News

LANGLOIS, Ore. - Thanksgiving is just around the corner, but before you go to eat a bite of your cranberry sauce, you might be interested to know how it got to your table.

At Sea Wind Farms in Langlois, it's cranberry harvest time.

"We've already beaten the bog to loosen the cranberries, and now we're gonna, as you can see behind me, they're corralled up," says farm manager Knute Andersson.

The harvest officially got underway last week, after what Andersson calls an ideal growing season.

"This year the size is so much better. We're probably at 25 to 30 percent larger berries."

According to Andersson it takes a few hours to get all the berries from the bog onto trucks, but the process is fairly simple.

"After the beater gets done, they're floating, the wind usually moves them somewhere and we just run a plastic boom around them and pull tight. We then use a fruit or fish pump to get them out, it leaves no dings or dents in the berries."

One bog can produce anywhere between 1,200 to 1,400 barrels of cranberries that's about seven to eight truckloads. Once they're taken from the bog, they're trucked to the Ocean Spray facility in Bandon.

Once at Ocean Spray, the berries will be cleaned and sorted again, and then boxed and sent to a freezer or a concentrator.

Andersson says they should clear all of their 72 bogs within five weeks, just in time for Thanksgiving.

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