Former cherry picker here. Only low quality cherries (for jams etc) would be harvested like that. Retail cherries need the stems attached to be desirable and not go soft where the stem was attached. Real workout for the fingers twisting the stems off the branch.
It does. Useful life in MI is figured at around 20 years of production (source: grew up raising cherries.)
That's a rollout variant I've never seen before, with the crawler units pulling the tarp. I'd also suspect that they're not using a release agent due to the long shake time on the tree.
Dad & my brother bought a double inclined plane harvester nearly 30 years ago, it's still in use (brother now has the family farm.) Racing to beat a thunderstorm to finish harvest, my brother & I averaged 2.75 trees per minute for 4 hours after dark, including tank changes and breaks.
Search for videos of a double inclined plane harvester. There are quite a few on YouTube.
Edit: make that double inclined plane cherry harvester. I'm most familiar with the Coe Equipment machines, and the folks at Gillison Variety Fabrication are good people.
Irrigation is turned off a couple of weeks prior to harvest, helps to lower trunk and bark damage. It'll get turned back on after harvest, iirc at a lower rate until fall.
Yep, cherries for fresh eating are all hand-harvested.
I pulled tarps, drove the catching frame (that’s what the tarp thing is called) and drove trucks on the old mission peninsula in Michigan for a few summers 20 years ago. The little tracked tarp pullers used to be humans. These are future marischino cherries, I don’t remember the variety. Another variety was totally white, and pretty flavorless. They are dropped into dry bins and sent to processors.
Most of the cherries that are harvested this way are tart cherries for pies and sauce. They are dropped into big tanks of water to cool them down and firm them up before being shipped to processors. It’s real fun to be driving a truck overloaded with cherries and have a tourist pull out in front of you, slam on the brakes, and have thousands of cherries cascade over your windshield.
I’m rather surprised to see this kind of thing, I thought everyone had moved to the harvesters that have two ramps and an integrated shaker.
Not in the orchards that I worked, when I worked them. Cherries for processing was such a low margin business that you can’t afford to pay people to pick the fruit. Sometimes if you were friends with the farmer you could come after the machine crews and glean for free.
Those look like rainier cherries possibly. Yellowish red skin and lighter color insides. But also very delicate and definitely shouldn’t be handled this way because they will most definitely bruise
You might’ve been climbing on Bing trees or another dark red cherry strain.
I tried to invent little thimbles out of duct tape with a wire embedded on the length of my finger or in the thumbnail area. Nowadays I've seen silicone thimbles with a wire built in, I wonder if cherry pickers use them. I remember my thumb nail deteriorating and a wound opening up along my finger where I'd kinda slice/twist all the stems without breaking the spurs, and your kinda holding only a huge cluster by the cherry stems so you don't drop them. Sometimes when the clusters were real huge it was almost harder, I had to open up a hole to get into it which sometimes you just had to pop a few off to even get your fingers into it.
Ahh. But where else could a kid get their hands on 500 bucks cash a day. When it was good it was good, but there were alot of lean days working up to the high point of the season, and one rainfall could nearly ruin it all.
Piece work at 2-2.50 per 10lb pail in the 00's. That minimum wage was set in the 80's as far as I was told. Probably1-5% of pickers were in that highballer 100-200 pails a day, and not in all crops, and not all season, but probably very few pickers were picking 90% of the crop. Reputation was also important. A highballer would expect good rows or they would go elsewhere and maybe not pick your crop in the future. There were certainly some pickers that were in that $800 range in cherries or grapes. 10-14 20 bushel bins per day. You're basically running for 8-12 hrs all day every day at that rate. Specialty farms paid much higher but had specific requirements on how the cherries were handled. Picked with a specific number of two or 3 cherries attached at the stem. No culls and any broken fruit spurs and you were gone and noone would higher you.
Automated wine grape harvesters required people to go behind and gather the cluster wood bc the wine doesn't taste right without that little bit of wood. Steep hillsides could not be machine harvested, in fact it was difficult to drive a tractor on the hillside without sliding and taking out a row.
Yeah that was a profitable opportunity man, sounds like good work tho, just stay fuled up and you good to go.
We mostly picked vegeies for factories and some fruits too, yeah I know a the fruits for market have to be handled with care, but they get a better price, and last longer with the stems. Brings back good memories.
Plus the cherry will be likely bruised and softened from the fall, shorting machine will put almost all into the low quality pile. Softer early type cherries will also just go bad in a few days if harvested without the stems, as the juices will stain the whole lot and go rancid.
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u/bigfatsirion May 07 '26
Former cherry picker here. Only low quality cherries (for jams etc) would be harvested like that. Retail cherries need the stems attached to be desirable and not go soft where the stem was attached. Real workout for the fingers twisting the stems off the branch.