After years of struggling to clean and sort an increasing volume of berries by hand, we had to find a faster/better way.  That way finally arrived when “Lucy” our optical sorter was delivered on July 4th, 2011.  After the initial commissioning by the manufacturer, we used her that season for sorting.  The sorter uses a color camera, 4 different kinds of lasers and compressed air to remove unwanted berries and other foreign material from the incoming stream of fruit.  OMG, what a massive improvement!  It really blew our minds.  If you have ever seen the Chocolate Factory episode from the 1950’s series “I Love Lucy”, then you’ll understand why we lovingly call her “Lucy”.  If you’ve never seen it, Click here to view it.  It is a hilarious classic!  The berries came at us far faster than we had anticipated and initially we couldn’t keep up with her.  Now that we have adjusted to the increased speed, it has helped us to increase the volume of berries we can handle as well as greatly increase the quality of the fruit we produce.  We were the one of the first, if not the first saskatoon berry farm in Western Canada to employ this kind of technology back then.