WAREHAM, Mass. - October is Massachusetts Cranberry Month, and right now, farmers are hard at work in their bogs, running tours, and shipping their berries off to buyers.

On Cape Cod, and throughout the surrounding area, companies large and small know the annual harvest, which typically runs from late September to early November, is a time to roll up their sleeves and maximize profits.

There are more than 13,000 acres of commercial cranberry bogs in the state, and the AD Makepeace Company owns roughly 13 percent. On Thursday, VP of marketing and communications, Linda Burke, was checking in on an ongoing harvest at one of the company’s bogs in Wareham.

“What they’re doing is bringing the corralled berries up into the truck, and they go first through a pump which removes the leaves, vines, and so forth that may have been caught up in the process, and then it gets pumped into a tractor trailer and taken off to Ocean Spray,” Burke said.

As North America’s largest cranberry grower, AD Makepeace has dozens of employees scattered across the company’s flooded bogs, and they even use drones to check in regularly on some of their more remote bogs.

As far as Massachusetts cranberry companies go, the massive scale the company operates on is the exception, not the rule. There are dozens of smaller farms tucked away in remote corners of Cape Cod.

David Ross has been a cranberry farmer since 1983, and his payroll includes his son and one other part-time employee.

“I used to joke that the trapdoor opened and I fell in,” Ross said. “I had the opportunity to acquire a cranberry farm, and I took over another guy’s farm and kept acquiring farms.”

Ross had prior farming experience in the dairy industry, which translated over to this new career with some proper training.

“I had a good mentor, but the term mentor hadn’t been invented in the 1980s. They were just old guys that wanted to quit,” Ross said.

Ross offers tours during the harvest season through his company Cape Cod Cranberry Bog Tours. Over time, he’s noticed a growing focus on the tourism side of the industry, with more and more people eager to see what it’s like walking a mile in his shoes.

“People are very interested in food and where it comes from now, that’s been a big surprise to me,” Ross said. “The first 20 years, we labored in obscurity, but now everybody’s very interested in where their food comes from. We have a good story with cranberries, it’s very associated with Cape Cod and Southeastern Mass.”

Ross is optimistic about the future of his industry, but if there’s one thing he worries about, it’s an aging workforce. More people taking interest in touring a bog hasn’t necessarily translated into a new generation taking jobs.

“It’s a big issue that most of the members are males who are 60 and older, and I’m very blessed to have a son who’s 35 that wants to take over the farm,” Ross said. “There’s many, many other more lucrative professions that young people are drawn to that aren’t as physically or mentally demanding and pay better.”

In declaring October as Massachusetts Cranberry Month, Gov. Healey hopes to encourage people to buy Massachusetts-made cranberry products, as well as visit a bog near them.