Blueberry Night

The sky is the inky blue of first dark, the color that lingers just before the heavy lid of night is dropped overhead. One by one, cars are quietly turning off a country road to crunch their tires up a gravel lane. Shelley and I fall in with the caravan and turn off the road as well. We move through an open field, lined with tidy green bush-rows in every direction and park along the shoulder with everyone else. This is the place. Getting out of the car, it’s easy to see now up close what makes these bushes so unique: berries the color of the sky are clustered everywhere. I grab a handful and slide them into my mouth as I walk by. Wow. Plump, firm, with just the right explosion of sugar. It’s blueberry picking time alright! We’re about to catch a glimpse of a nighttime harvest in Moxee, Washington.

We meet up with Gabe Pedroza, the blueberry field manager for Roy Farms. They’ve been picking 12 hour night shifts since June 27, but Gabe greets us with an easy going smile. We learn that this is an organic Draper field. Duke and Bluegolds are the other blueberry varieties also grown by the Roys here in their sixth year of raising berries, but tonight it’s an all Draper harvest. He explains that picking at night in the cooler temps helps maintain the quality of the fruit as the summer sun can be quite harsh on the delicate berries. All of these tonight are bound for Vancouver for individual quick freezing (IQF). For all of you smoothie lovers out there, that means your bag of organic frozen blueberries in the freezer right now could have come from a field just like this one.

As we head over toward the activity hub, it feels a bit otherworldly, like we are walking into a clandestine CIA staging area. Under the cover of night, four giant harvesters two stories high idle side by side with a loud hum as people in bright yellow safety vests move this way and that. Forklifts load and unload pallets of bright red empty bins, kicking up dust whirls in their wake under the harsh false light. Systems are checked, supplies are prepared, and the sky just keeps getting darker. Come 10 pm, 12 hours of picking will commence, and everything must be ready.

As the clock strikes 10:00, the behemoth machines groan into action, all four moving to the same area, where they will begin their picking. The harvesters drive over the top of the bush-rows where from the top deck area the workers drive, sort and stack—6 people to a machine—and beneath this, spinning cylinders of finger bars move on either side of the bushes to gently shake the ripe berries loose. If they are truly ripe, they fall off easily. Gabe tells us that every field is picked twice so that anything that wasn’t quite ready the first time around, gets a second chance. The berries fall onto conveyor belts that bring them up top where leaves and branches are sorted out, and as bins fill up they are stacked together on pallets to be unloaded at the end of the line by waiting forklifts.

After walking a slow, forward moving pace following the brightly lit machines through the dark field like moths, we reach the end of the row. There is a new flurry of activity under the spotlights as pallets—I see three on the machine I’m following—stacked high with full bins of blueberries are unloaded from the harvesters. The entire back area of the upper deck hydraulically lowers itself to ease the unloading of the precious cargo. The forklifts take their prize to a reefer truck back at the staging area where the berries will coolly wait until the end of the night’s picking. From there they will be unloaded into a cold room back at Roy Farms until they are picked up by the buyers own reefer truck and moved out for immediate IQF. From ripe on the bush to individually frozen in about 24 hours. Dang.

It goes like this all night long and well past dawn. The machines following their own rhythm and picking pattern which somehow compliments the other harvesters around them. Walking back to the car we gorge ourselves on ripe berries and reflect on the evening. There is something about a night harvest that has a surreal quality to it. Maybe it’s the intense, focused, clusters of light and action occurring in the dark isolation of a rural field while the rest of the world sleeps. Throw in some massive high tech machinery and you have yourself a downright outer limits experience. I can say one thing with blue tonguéd assurance—blueberries are definitely well worth it!

*A big thank you to Michael Roy for being so accomodating and Gabe Pedroza for spending so much time with us!!