Brandon Mulvaney (in the blue shirt) operates the over-the-row platform wirelessly. It began two years ago with a rough sketch on a napkin, followed by a design on legal paper, and then a mockup made of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) pipe driven by a tractor. This summer, the final proof of concept was unveiled: a 54-foot wide, 17,000-pound, 80-horsepower over-the-row self-propelled platform designed to carry up to 20 workers down five orchard rows simultaneously. “It’s more sophisticated than maybe we had anticipated,” commented Karen Lewis, Washington State University Extension educator for the Columbia Basin, principal investigator for the project, as she […]