Blueberry Harvesting

By Jake Laube

Blueberries are picked during the summer months, from July to August. Most mass-produced blueberries have two big crops about one to two weeks apart. The first picking of berries produces the highest quantity and quality of blueberries. They are picked by canneries with about one to two hundred fifty workers to be sold for fresh markets. The fresh market is when the blueberries are hand-picked and brought back to the cannery, cleaned, and sent down to the California-Arizona area. When blueberries are hand-picked, they are worth a lot more than machine-picked. 

Machine-picked blueberries are not as good as hand-picked. The reason is mostly the number of blueberries that there are. When the berries are picked with the machines they get badly bruised up. This makes the blueberries not taste as good. When blueberries are picked with the machine, they are brought to a cannery, cleaned with a professional-grade washer, and usually frozen and put into bags. These are also used for things like muffins or frozen pies. One drawback of the machine blueberry pickers is that they cost $250,000, so it takes a long time to recover your costs.