(bright upbeat music) - Hello, my name is Ryan Neal and we're at my blueberry farm called Neal Family Farm in Rogers, Arkansas.

And today, we're going to be showing you what it's like to be both a blueberry farmer and we're also going to pick some blueberries.

(bright upbeat music continues) On the field trip today, we're gonna go through the process of growing blueberries from when they're little bitty baby plants and we put them in the ground to when the we let them fruit about two years later.

And a blueberry plant can produce for over 30 years after it's reached maturity.

Being a blueberry farmer is a year-round job.

It starts at the beginning of the year.

In early spring, we finish pruning the plants where we cut out about 1/3 of all of the branches and stems.

After that, it's important that we mulch around each plant with organic matter like sawdust in order to keep in moisture and stay on top of the weeds.

Here at Neal Family Farm, we have about 12 different varieties of blueberries.

And that allows us to pick blueberries for about six weeks in the summer.

If we just had one variety, we would probably only have berries for about 10 days to two weeks.

While the plants are young, we wanna strip the flowers off of them for the first two years, so that they can get big and healthy before they produce their first blueberries.

Not only people like blueberries, but some of our biggest pests include birds.

Birds like robins and starlings enjoy blueberries as well, and it's a big job for us to try to keep the birds from eating all of the blueberries.

We don't mind sharing some, but we don't want them to eat all of them, so that we can have some too.

(bright upbeat music continues) My favorite thing about being a blueberry farm is working with my family.

We all pitch in when it's time to help.

And that includes pruning, mowing the grass, picking the blueberries, and weeding.

So, we all pitch in as a family here at Neal Family Farm in order to get the job done.

(bright upbeat music continues) We operate primarily as a pick-your-own farm.

Meaning, we allow folks from the public to come to the farm and pick their own berries, which they'll then take home and enjoy.

(bright upbeat music continues) So, this is a baby blueberry plant.

We got it from the nursery.

It was about 18 months old.

We planted it here at Neal Family Farm about three months ago, the 1st of March.

So, what we do here is, as farmers, we work in the ground and we use our tractor to pull up what's called a raised bed.

So, everything under this black tarp here is soil.

We amended that soil with things like peat moss and sawdust and lots of organic matter in order to give the roots a nice habitat to discover.

We cover the soil while the plants are young with this black fabric.

And what that does is it both helps to warm up the soil as the sun heats it and warms the ground and makes the roots grow better, but it also keeps all of the weeds from being able to outcompete our baby plants.

As you can see here, this young plant is probably a little bit too small to be producing blueberries.

And so, it's important for us for the first two years of this plant's life to remove any young fruit that it might be trying to produce.

This allows the plant to put all of its energy into growing as fast and as big as quickly as possible.

(bright upbeat music continues) So, I showed you what a baby plant looks like when we just put it into the ground, and this is just three years later.

You can see these plants are taller than me in some cases and I'm six-foot-tall.

And you can see that these plants are just loaded with blue ripe berries that are ready to be harvested.

Each one of these plants, we hope will produce around one gallon of blueberries.

It takes about 450 berries to make one gallon of blueberries.

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