A four-person picking crew can have two on the ground or all four on the platform, but each pick into their own tube. An apple harvest prototype machine that’s part of a national research effort to automate specialty crop production was put to test in Pacific Northwest orchards during the 2011 harvest. The vacuum system apple harvester, designed by Michigan’s DBR Conveyor Concepts, has been tested in eastern U.S. orchards, but its arrival in Washington State at the end of September marked the start of machine’s first trials in large-scale West Coast orchards. The machine is a combination of machinery […]