To harvest the delicious lowbush 
blueberry , pickers must spend long 
hours stooped over the rows of 
ankle-high plants. A rake of 
galvanized metal, top right, is used 
to pull the berries off the bushes. 
these tools have long, thin teeth and 
: I a reversed handle that extends over 
the teeth, so that when the picker 
tilts a rake, berries roll into a col- 
lecting area at the back. One Abijah 
Tabbutt of Columbia Falls invented 
the blueberry rake in 1883. The first 
one, designed for the rough ground 
s of unimproved fields, had only eight 
;e I teeth. On today’s flatter fields, on the 
! Barrens, pickers use rakes with forty 
to sixty teeth. Tabbutt’s grandson 
it I Clarence Drisko carries on the busi- 
er ness at 86, selling most of the 3,000 
rakes he produces in a year to the 
- • giant blueberry companies, Jasper 
‘ Wyman of Millbridge and A.L. Stew- 
art and Sons of Cherryfield. 
Both companies bus in Micmac In- 
dians from Nova Scotia for the har- 
vest, but many of the pickers are 
Washington County residents earning 
extra cash for back-to-school clothes 
or for plain subsistence in the bleak 
economy of rural Maine. On the Bar- 
rens, where picking conditions are 
ideal, a large family can make up to 
$400 a day. But the work is very hard 
and a complete anachronism in the 
general context of American agricul- 
ture. The largest machine at a picking 
site is the winnower, which is a port- 
able conveyor belt device usually run 
by a lawn mower motor. Some are 
still operated by hand. 
“Every year for fifteen years, I’ve 
stood on the Barrens and said to my- 
self, ‘I don’t believe that people will 
pick 20 million pounds of blueberries 
like that,’ ” says Amr Ismail. Dr. Is- 
mail, an expatriate Egyptian, is no 
casual observer of the lowbush blue- 
berry scene. He is the Maine Blue- 
berry Professor of Horticulture at the 
University of Maine in Orono. Ismail 
also supervises the Blueberry Hill En- 
vironmental Farm, a research facility 
in Washington County. There, in sci- 
entifically managed, mulched plots, 
this exuberant, rotund botanist and 
a small team of colleagues are de- 
veloping lowbush blueberry clones 
that will produce a bigger crop of 
berries than the average wild types. 
More important, these clones are low- 
bush cultivars. At Blueberry Hill, 
there is now actually a cultivated 
patch Ismail has developed. The clone 
spreads slowly, taking a decade to 
cover a field. But Ismail says that 
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