Andy Soth:
If you've never seen cranberries harvested before, you might not know that's what Dan Brockman is doing.  But even veteran cranberry growers might wonder how exactly he's harvesting the berries.

Dan Brockman:
I always figured there's a better way to do just about any job.  It's just that you have to figure it out, you know.

Soth:
What Brockman has figured out may revolutionize the cranberry industry.

Brockman:
I think that within, ah, three to five years, the vast majority of the crops will be harvested with this machine.

Soth:
Brockman's machine is called the Ruby Slipper, named for the way it slips the shot ruby red fruit off the vine.

Brockman:
The cranberry vine with the berries on is hit by this bar and the berries get stripped off and the vine just slides through underneath.

Soth:
The fruit that's picked off the vine floats in a flooded bog. It's rounded up, cleaned and sent for processing into juice or into cranberry sauce.  Or the berries can be dried and sweetened.  

Soth:
Long ago, cranberries were picked by hand.  Then growers developed hand rakes to strip the fruit from the vine.  After World War Two, growers like Carl Getzinger and Bob Case developed the first mechanical pickers that still bear their names.  It's been the cranberry tradition that growers develop their own equipment.

Brockman:
In the whole scheme of agriculture cranberries are pretty a small business.  There’s probably less than a thousand, or maybe a thousand growers in the whole United States.  So a company, John Deere, something like that probably isn't going to manufacture specific dedicated cranberry equipment.

Soth:
But Brockman's business partner, a small family business in Wisconsin Rapids called BDT does specialize in cranberry equipment.

Dave Dix:
We're centrally located in Wisconsin so we get a lot of the growers that are just in this regional area that are coming to us for different applications.  And throughout the years of working with these people we've developed different products for them.

Soth:
Dix says the Ruby Slipper can do the job about five times faster than this machine called a water wheel or a beater.  The beater has been standard equipment for about the last quarter century.

Brockman:
The nice thing with this machine, too, is that with its simplicity there're a lot less moving parts, a lot less things that could potentially break.  And it's also a lot easier on the cranberry plants themselves and on the fruit.

Soth:
Brockman says the individual spring-mounted feet on the slipper mean it can better handle uneven terrain getting berries a beater misses to produce a higher yield.  And unlike the old beater, the Ruby Slipper is an implement that attaches to a conventional farm tractor.

Brockman:
I didn't want a dedicated piece of equipment that sat in the shed for eleven or eleven and a half months out of the year, that's only used at harvest.

Soth:
While the Ruby Slipper is a new technology, it is part of a long tradition of cranberry growers inventing their own tools.  But unlike Getzinger and Case, Brockman won't name it for himself.

Brockman:
I don't name things after me. I want a name people remember.  Everyone remembers the Ruby Slipper.