Athletes of the Rake
By Jordan Ramos
In open fields found venturing through the woods or down dirt roads in rural far northeast regions of Maine, awaits a unique summer challenge and ceremony: to harvest Maine’s tiniest native fruit. This watercolor painting series, called Athletes of the Rake, illustrates the hand-raking communities who come to harvest wild blueberries in Downeast Maine every summer. Hand-raking is a traditional harvesting method that gathers the delicate fruit using a short-handled rake in the rugged terrain of fields, where the unique landscape structure was shaped by glaciers roughly 10,000 years ago. The fields where the wild blueberry plants naturally sprawl are very rocky, with sandy soil deposits from retreating glaciers, as well as on hilly topographies shaped by the retreating ice (Borns 2018; Calderwood et al 2020).
In Maine’s wild blueberry industry, hand-raking has long been the gentlest method to harvest the crop compared to mechanical harvesters which result in greater yield loss, more damage to the plant, bruised berries, and poorer quality (Mara et al.1989). However, this careful harvest by hand is a strenuous exercise, requiring rakers to stoop down to comb berries off the tops of eight-inch-tall plants for hours under the summer sun. Despite the outdoor labor, which can be difficult at times to endure, the Maine summer of berry harvesting offers a unique “wild” experience that many return for year after year.
The practice of hand-raking carries on the heritage of the harvest, through which the wild blueberry landscape has a legacy of collective communal stewardship by Wabanaki Tribes for thousands of years (Calhoun et al. 2023). As commercialization of the crop expanded the industry in the early 1900s, hundreds of people and families from Maine, across the U.S., and Canada would flock to the fields for this seasonal work (Salt 1985). For some it was also a tradition to take part in the annual community harvest. The arrival of mechanical harvesters in the 1970’s, however, brought a dramatic change to the landscape, and the number of hand-raking crews on the fields has dwindled. Yet, some farmers still needed people to harvest fields in the roughest terrain or prioritized quality fruit picking, and the local labor shortage led to the employment of immigrant workers from Latin America in the 1990’s (Mamgain 2013). Despite bringing new communities of people to the fields, mechanical harvesters have displaced many or some found other work elsewhere for better pay. Since the early 2000’s, scenes of people harvesting in the field have become a rare sight. With my work, I aim to pay homage to the hardworking communities who keep the cultural heritage of hand-raking alive today.
These four watercolor paintings each showcase harvest scenes from local, migrant, and Passamaquoddy and Mi’kmaq Indigenous crews. In the summer of 2025, I traveled to rake with various crews harvesting wild blueberry fields of Downeast Maine to learn about their perspective on this traditional practice. Each painting is paired with quotes gathered from the conversations I had with the rakers I met.
This painting series, called Athletes of the Rake, is a tribute to the hand-rakers and their intensive work of harvesting Maine wild blueberries. By shining a light on farm workers, I aim to foster appreciation for the incredible work these people do to harvest food as well as spread awareness of the community around this harvest. Through intersecting art, storytelling, and ecology, my project aims to rekindle our relationship with tending to natural food and biodiverse ecosystems. Additionally, I hope these scenes and perspectives of the harvesters invite the public to engage in conversations about the interconnected relationships between food, land, and people.
As an artist, I sought to create this project to illustrate the connections between the labor work and the legacy of wild blueberry landscapes. I was compelled to create this work at a time when the Maine wild blueberry industry is rapidly accelerating towards mechanization, which has visibly changed the landscape and displaced communities and traditions. The annual summer season of hand-raking is atrophying in community culture. While mechanical tractor harvesters may be more efficient for farmers during economic challenges and local labor shortages, these machines require a supply of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the health of the wild blueberry ecosystem has been affected by climate change (Tasnim et al. 2022). The phenological growing stages of the plant have shifted schedule from nature’s calendar, resulting, among other things, in a mismatch between the arrival of native beneficial pollinators and open bloom flowers (Peng et al. 2025). My body of work explores the significance of preserving the traditional harvest practice of hand-raking to conserve these 10,000-year-old wild blueberry landscapes in Maine, as we are living in an anthropogenically induced climate crisis.
Spiritual Retreat, Watercolor, 2025
“You’re on the ground and not in an office building or with artificial light. You’re out here on the land and it’s emotionally, physically, and spiritually healthy, and I think we’ve lost that in our society now” – Kris Larson, a longtime raker for 58 seasons in Downeast Maine and 72 years old.
Kris shows me his favorite stickered rake, which he named Bull Moose. At 72 years old, he’s grateful to be out here on the barrens under a blue sky listening to the crows, in the place he calls home. “Just meditate on this,” he recites a line he lives by from Anton Chekhov, a Russian playwright: “It’s people like that the Earth rests upon.” He points around the crew dispersed in the field, “It’s all the people (rakers) who harvest a wild food on this land and take care of it”.
Sweeping Machine, Watercolor, 2025
“Being out here with these guys, my friends, takes my mind away from the sad and depressing times in my life”. Eric, a hand-raker on a small migrant Honduran crew.
After joining this crew for highbush blueberry picking in Michigan this spring, where he normally works construction jobs in the winter, Eric decided to go along with them on their harvest migration routes in the Northeast. Raking wild (lowbush) blueberries is entirely different, but he quickly picked up the fast harvest technique from watching the motion of the other guys. Called sweeping, the art of this style of raking involves swinging the rake side to side while exercising your whole body to lunge forward. The metal tines on the rake swoosh across the tops of the plants to gather the array of blue fruit and allow you to look out upon the rainbow of colors in the landscape.
Trail Blazed by Families, Watercolor, 2025
“Me gusta libre en el campo” (I like to be free in the field), Maria, a mother, tells me about raking with her son in the open blueberry fields of Maine.
Based in Ohio, they spend the entire year touring across the U.S. to harvest different crops such as apples, corn, highbush blueberries, and pumpkins. At the end of a long harvesting journey every year, she says they spend December back at home in Mexico, along with many other families from Mexico on this same crew.
Harvest Built for Human Endurance, Watercolor, 2025
“If you can rake berries, you can do any labor job”, is what Bobby always tells his son.
Bobby has been in this field since he was a kid, when his dad first brought him from their home in New Brunswick. Now he is bringing his son with him every year to continue their family tradition. He hopes raking will teach his son the value of a hard work ethic, just as it taught him. Outside of the blueberry harvest season, Bobby works lobstering and building houses in the year.
Hand-raking brings them back to their Wabanaki ancestral land, but they also enjoy it for the exercise, which is what a lot of the people I’ve met on this crew tell me. The fields in the Passamaquoddy land where this wild fruit grows in aren’t easy to pick, and that’s why one raker who loves the challenge that raking offers, told me he spends his time leading up to the harvest season “training to fight the blue”.
Bibliography
Borns, Harold. 2018. “Glacial Geology of Maine’s Blueberry Barrens.” https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/nabrew2018/proceedingpapers/proceedingpapers/6/.
Calderwood, Lily, David E. Yarborough, and Brogan Tooley. 2025. “About Maine Wild Blueberry – Cooperative Extension: Maine Wild Blueberries – University of Maine Cooperative Extension.” Cooperative Extension: Maine Wild Blueberries. September 2025. https://extension.umaine.edu/blueberries/about/.
Calhoun, Aram, Malcolm Jr Hunter Jr., and Kent Redford. 2023. Our Maine. Rowman & Littlefield.
Mamgain, Vaishali. 2013. “Ripples from the East Coast Stream: Contributions from Migrant Hispanic Workers to Maine’s Wild Blueberry Industry.” Maine Policy Review 22 (2). https://doi.org/10.53558/hjhz8899.
Marra, Michele C., Timothy A. Woods, Russell Parker, Nun Nun San, and Mario F. Teisl. 1989. “A Comparison of Lowbush Blueberry Harvesting Technologies: Experimental and Economic Results from the 1988 Field Tests in Washington County, Maine.” Maine Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 825. Orono: University of Maine. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/aes_bulletin/40/.
Peng, Shijia, Aaron M Ellison, and Charles C Davis. 2025. “Climate Change Intensifies Plant–Pollinator Mismatch and Increases Secondary Extinction Risk for Plants in Northern Latitudes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122 (40). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2506265122.
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Tasnim, Rafa, Sean Birkel, Lily Calderwood, Samuel Roberts, and Yong-Jiang Zhang. 2022. “Seasonal Climate Trends across the Wild Blueberry Barrens of Maine, USA.” Atmosphere 13 (5): 690. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13050690.