As wild blueberries ripen across more than 47,000 acres in Maine, thousands of people will pick up rakes to harvest them — rakes almost certainly designed and made by an 83-year-old in Jonesport.
For the past 35 years, Ike Hubbard has been supplying the wild blueberry industry in Maine, along with a range of other berry and herb farmers the world over, from a shop beside his home. He’s the last commercial maker of handheld rakes in Maine and, it appears, the country.
“I just like being here,” he said in the kitchen of his historical family homestead on Wednesday, about a week before the start of the blueberry harvest. “This is where I grew up, and I intend to stay here as long as I can. This is my blood.”
It seems like almost everything has changed in the industry since Hubbard was a boy, he said. New herbicides in the 1980s were credited with tripling yields for growers. Gone are the wooden baskets he used for harvesting in the 1940s, while mechanized harvesting tractors have become common sights on commercial Down East blueberry barrens.
But his hand rakes are still used by various growers, including smaller operations, those working challenging terrain and others harvesting to sell fresh berries — and they pick a better product, according to Hubbard. A design he first made for local blueberry growers has grown into a range of rakes sold across the world for a variety of crops.
Growing up in Jonesport, Hubbard worked berry harvests every summer, helped his family around the farm and enjoyed his closeknit community. But when he was a teenager, he was “dragged out of town” by his parents to southern Maine, where he went on to work as a manufacturing engineer.
On a trip home with his wife in 1988, Hubbard saw the family homestead on Mason Bay Road abandoned and couldn’t bear the thought of it being bought by someone from away, he said. Two years later, the couple had moved in, and his fledgling rake business was taking off.
Local growers asked him to make a rake that wouldn’t break while also causing minimal damage to berries.
The resulting design, with lighter, tougher materials and a wider pan to collect berries, was described as the “Cadillac of rakes” by some of the first to use it, according to Bangor Daily News coverage at the time.
It was a revamp of a rake created by a Mainer, Alijah Tabbutt, in the 1880s. Those were still manufactured in Columbia Falls through the 1990s, according to BDN archives.
Using a Hubbard rake, a skilled worker can harvest berries that are as intact as when they’re picked by hand, ensuring that they stay covered in whitish “bloom,” a natural coating that’s believed to preserve the fruit’s quality.
“When you get these berries with the bloom on them…it’s like they glow,” Hubbard said.
The design is also ideal for harvesting berries that will be sold fresh rather than frozen, as University of Maine studies have found that handraking leads to less berry damage than machine harvesting. On the other hand, mechanical harvesters can save labor costs and harvest more efficiently, according to the university.
Hubbard has developed designs along the way with input from migrant workers and members of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, adding custom handles or trying new lengths. His offerings range from 12-tooth miniature decorative rakes to 110-tooth, 35-inch spans.
The designs expanded further into rakes for harvesting herbs, cranberries, highbush blueberries, huckleberries and elderberries. The business also makes tooth-based garden tools for Winslow-based farm supplier Johnny’s Selected Seeds, such as broadforks for aerating soil and handheld weeding claws.
That seed company calls the tools that Hubbard helped develop part of a “small scale farming revolution.”
On a weekday shortly before the 2025 harvest, the phone rang with orders in the small office in Hubbard’s home while two local employees worked in the shop across the yard. Among new rakes — each takes about three or four hours from start to finish, depending on the size – was a stack of used ones with bent teeth, waiting for Hubbard. He designed them to be fixable and will repair them for free if damaged from regular use.
At 83, he is still inventing. He’s built a long-handled rake that can be used without bending down, which he lends to people who want to pick some berries for their own use. Behind the shop sat a prototype of a flame weeder built from a barbecue grill Hubbard had rescued from the dump; inside, he experimented with adding wheels to a rake.
“I’m a junkyard dog,” he said with a smile.
His products are now shipped all over the country and the world, for chamomile farmers on the west coast, blueberry growers in Ukraine and New Zealand, and boysenberry rakers in Alaska.
Hubbard could have worked on mechanical harvesters, too, but he chooses not to.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t build anything that would put somebody out of work,” he said.
He owns six and a half acres of blueberry land himself and manages about a dozen in total, selling the berries to a cooperative in East Machias. His rakes are used to harvest them, some by his shop employees.
While the industry has changed, the Hubbard Rake Co. remains busy. Even one of the big processors is one of his major customers. That’s because, Hubbard said, quality speaks for itself.
