Apple harvester DEBUTS: The Phil Brown harvester gently vacuums in apples, making good use of labor

摘要

Like the good inventors they are, Phil Brown and Mike Rasch spent the winter tearing apart their prototype vacuum-powered fresh-market apple harvester and emerged in late February with a redesigned machine. They got it together just in time to show itto visitors who came to Phil Brown Welding in Conklin, Michigan, in early March, during the International FruitTree Association annual conference. What a difference a winter makes. The new machine is smaller—a two-picker version instead of using four people—and it no longer relies on Brown's Brownie II four-man orchard platform as a carrier or for power. In this new rendition, the harvester consists of a self-contained vacuum module powered by a 20-horsepower Honda engine. The older version ran off hydraulic power generated from the Brownie II engine and was integrated into it.