Radar adds technological twist to age-old cranberry counting process

A farmer harvests cranberries from a flooded marsh at Cranberry Creek Cranberries Inc. in Necedah, Wisconsin. UW-Madison engineers have invented a device that automates the process of counting cranberries on the bush and estimating the harvest. Photo: Jeff Miller It's a quintessential cranberry scene: Thigh-deep in a flooded bog full of millions of floating berries, two farmers extol the merits of products made from the tart red fruit. Most of the year, however, the bog is dry and the ripening cranberries cling to a dense tangle of woody, low-growing vines. That's when people like Ben Tilberg start counting cranberries. "When we do crop estimations, we pick all of the fruit in a square-foot area and then we hand-count the berries," says Tilberg, a Babcock, Wisconsin-based scientist with the grower-owned cooperative Ocean Spray Cranberries.