Pecan Harvesting for Small Orchards

my name is Vince I own about 10 acres here in Bucky Louisiana and almost 10 acres I have about 33 pecan trees some of the trees are over 100 years old when I decided that I wanted to start harvesting these pecans that they're coming from these trees of course we started out with just a hand picking we used it just I don't know what you call them but the stompers did you just pick them up that way rollers everything we could think of we couldn't afford the big heavy industrial equipment that a lot of the Pickers were using but we wanted to collect the pecans ourselves so we didn't want to hire somebody to do it as well wasn't a lot of information on out there about how to do this at a low cost we finally found a bag of nut which I have right here I'm going to show you that my bag of that now is about I guess about 10 years old what it basically does is really neat effect it rolls over the pecans the pecans go in between the fingers right here and then they come across in their role in these baskets and that's the sense of what the back of that does so you have to stop periodically to get the pecans out of the basket now one of the disadvantages for the maginot that I found is he gets a lot of leaves and trash that also get caught up with the pecans so the cleaner the ground is the better the pick will be but of course as you see here we have a lot of cream ground the grasses well mowed not all of our area out here is like that but I'm going to show you how this works on the clean grass this bag anut is just connected to the back of my riding mower and that's what I use to harvest my pecans so here is the demo you can tell it takes a few times around to get all the pecans up and there will be a few left on the ground it's not 100% but I would say gets the majority of the pecans up so I just basically driving a circles around all my trees I do run with the blade on this is to blow any of the leaves and trash so it helps keep the pecans a little cleaner as I'm going around I keep mine up on its highest setting to blow the trash out and I lose a few pecans that way but majority all in all I not not enough to mash so now pick the pecans got them in my hopper here behind my bagging up basically the transport amount as I'm thinking I just dump them into my trailer standard trailer you can pick up at any hardware store and that's where they go as you can see there's a lot of trash still we have sticks we've got leaves we've got grass get these little twigs constantly and then when I bring them into the barn here at one moment I'm going to show you how I solved that you've already seen how I collect pecans using my bag of nut one of the pressing problems of the bag of nut is that there are a lot of trash leave stakes that caught up with the pecans and go into the picker so when we bring them in our born our biggest problem is sorting the pecans out from the trash and sticks so I'll show you how I've devised the system to do okay so you saw our they are harvested because that I'm going out into my trailer and brought them into my barn and basically what I do just screw them into five gallon buckets of course I need to wear gloves when I'm doing that because there's a lot of sticks and trash you're looking here you'll see we've got sticks at the pick ticker pick we've got the dead holes we've got the leaves grass all up in here and I take it over to my shoot that I've developed over here which is just sitting right here and it's above a squirrel cage fan and so we're going to show you this segment of it which is just dumping it into the chute and getting high appreciate yelling trash poured out of and everything so if pre-staged because back here on the shoot and on a moment I'm going to show you how this operates we push the pecans to shoot into the - this is our squirrel cage fan again right here it's blowing up through the to the trash leaves and extra sticks will come out the top and any really like pecans it really aren't any good anyway that we don't want the heavier stuff which is the good pecans and occasionally some sticks and other stuff will work its way through and come out on here all this is is a treadmill we had it later on the house weren't using it probably should but we work anyway we devised it to where it will slide the pecans across and put it into the table right here where we can do a little bit more cleaning and I'm fixin to show you that very large top of the shoot machines rather we go and the conveyor builder our treadmill is on and what we're going to do here pushing food secrecy out is actually function if you notice up at the top of the each you will see a lot of the tracks lying up here we go you right now what I'm going to show you here on the treadmill to see how clean the cards look so you kind of get out of here how that looks now it does take an extra person on the treadmill now on the end there to sorts of sticks as they come through because you will get some sticks through this to get rid of almost all your lead and your lighter stuff here we go take a look at this car coming down there's our sorting table right here that we've got at the end of our treadmill or our conveyor belt and as you see we didn't get all the sticks out there's a few that didn't blow out but we don't have any of the grass or the trash in here hardly at all we have a few whole pecans that have the whole still on them that need to be cleaned up a couple of crackers since there's some stuff that gets through and that's why you have somebody right here on the end of the treadmill picking they can sort you can have somebody right here as well you even have somebody here depending how many of you we have so by no means is it a one-man operation but it does speed up the operation a lot you can look right here you know as we go through the pecans are relatively clean we've gone down to the end here and we've made a board the reason we have this diag triangle right here as soon as we're pushing the pecans they don't fly out they go straight into our bag and then we tie our bag them we prefer the crawfish sex that you get down here in Louisiana because they just light it would carry the sort of reason some people use the big burlap sacks but you get a hundred pound sack you got a little bit around 25 to 35 sex a lot easier now if you look over here to the right you'll see a lot of this tracks this is what is coming out of the tubes that we've been using these sticks we get a lot of these these the leaves and grass or come out we get black hole because so all of this comes out and it blows down here so you see we do get a lot of the trash and we get it out and that's pretty much our operation that's how we have a setup and that's what we're doing here down in bulky Louisiana and we hope maybe you can use this information and design a system and we'd love to see your video of your system if you do want to

Channel: mortal2112

Views: 100,021

Rating: 4.9124579 out of 5

Keywords: pecan harvest, pecan harvester, harvester, harvesting, baganut nuts, nut harvester, pecan tree, pecan picking, bag-a-nut, how to, harvest, harvest pecans, pecan, riding mower, lawnmower, Tractor, Farmer, nut, nuts, walnuts, baganut, harvest nuts, pecan cleaner, pecan cleaning, pecan orchard

Id: 7un4bYoV1VQ

Length: 7min 15sec (435 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 17 2012