This is the United States Number One producer of a Tart Red Fruit that's on pretty much

every Thanksgiving dinner table. We have this reputation of being the dairy state

but cranberries outnumber the cows. Susan Hagnes, an electrical engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cranberries, she says, are big business.

They're the official state fruit.

And supply chain managers need estimates of the size of the upcoming harvest, which can be hard to make.

The current approach for estimating cranberry yield is literally to go out into the field and

hand pick and hand count all of the cranberries in one square foot area.

This is obviously a very inefficient and laborious approach.

There can in fact be up to 900 berries per square foot.

So scientists from Ocean spray asked Hagnes for help,

and she and her team found in lab tests

that zapping cranberry plants with microwaves

and then studying the signal that bounces back might just work.

Recall that your microwave oven works by exciting water molecules and whatever you're heating up.

Same concept here.

Micro waves interact differently with plump juicy cranberries, which contain lots of water,

than they do with leaves.

The return signal thus provides a good estimate of the number of cranberry clusters in a given plot.

By the way, the microwaves used for this application are very low power,

on par with the radiation that comes out of a cell phone.

You know, we're not cooking the cranberries right there in the field.

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