I did fairly good this year taking some videos while harvesting. I still haven’t gotten any photos of the whole sweeping process yet, I think the biggest reason is that I’m driving the harvester whenever he’s sweeping so it’s a bit difficult to run over there. I’ll try during our second picking though in the next week or so. Until then here are a few videos from this year.
Video 1: Video taken while I was harvesting. You can see the rows of nuts that have been swept up into windrows between the trees. I’m driving over those with the tractor, while the harvester behind me is picking the nuts off the ground, putting them over some chains to let the dirt drop back to the ground and then through a large fan that blows out all the lighter material. You can see the nuts bouncing back on the furthest chain where they will be dropped into a cart for unloading.
Video 2: This video was taken from the back of the harvester. You can see the nuts coming over the last chain and landing in the cart. Once this cart is full we unload the nuts into totes to remove them from the orchard.
Video 3: Once the totes are out of the orchard they are stacked in line to be dumped into a truck. Some farmers haul the tote to the processor, but we haul in bulk. Because of that we use a forklift with a rotater to dump the nuts from the tote into the truck. Our truck can haul about 18 totes at a time to the processor.
NuttyGrass 