Slim Pickin' Part II

Here is the back view of the berry picking machine. (That's my brother sitting on top) The left part of the machine is where we stand/sit (depending on whether we're sitting at the conveyer belt or standing to fill up the flats) for the berries. The right side is the part that goes through the actually berry plants. The berry plant goes in the middle of those white tong-type things. Those white things (which actually looks like one of those round combs used for curling your hair) shake up and down & rotate and that shakes the berries off of the plants. If you look closely, right in the middle of those you'll see a wooden pole with a red ribbon on top. The machine is ready to go through that row of berries. The red ribbons on the poles are indicators to let the driver know which row to go into next - because it's a big machine, we can't just move from one row to the next (well, we can but then we just end up having to reverse and straighen out which takes too long), instead we skip a couple of rows. The red ribbons ensure we don't miss any rows.