Rube Goldberg at Rock Spring Farm

On Tuesday, we took delivery on what may prove to be a life-changing (or at least, a fall-changing) machine, a Scott Viner root harvester This improbable-looking device pulls behind a tractor, and places carrots and beets directly into a 20-bushel bin on a wagon pulled by a second tractor.

I had been part of a crew running a similar device almost fifteen years ago at Harmony Valley Farm in Wisconsin, but had more-or-less discounted its applicability on a farm of our scale until I was visiting with David Van Eeckhout at Hog’s Back Farm east of the Twin Cities for a consulting project this spring. He had purchased one last fall, and put away some five thousand pounds of carrots in just over three hours. When he told me what he had paid for it, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the labor savings could pay for the machine in just one year, based only on last fall’s beet harvest at my farm. I called Roeter’s Farm Equipment, in the heart of Michigan’s vegetable-producing country, within hours of arriving home.

The Rube Goldberg device has belts running every-which-way to power more belts, pulleys, chains, elevators, and knives. Everywhere you look the machine has a grease fitting! A rider uses four different hydraulic levers and two more manual controls to steer, control the depth of two different parts, steer the belt that dumps roots in the wagon, and control the speed of the conveyor. Add three wheels and a conveyor that hangs out about eight feet to the side, and enough rust to indicate that it is certainly older than me, and you’ve got something that appears in stark contrast to the fiberglass-clad harvest machinery used in corn and bean fields.

Here’s how it works: a shoe at the front of the machine undercuts the roots at the same time two points lift and aligns the leaves. Twin belts grab the leaves and lift the roots out of the ground, conveying them toward the rear. Two sets of interlocking knives, rotating upwards like gears, grab the leaves and cut them from the top of the roots, which then fall onto a conveyor. The conveyor moves the roots out the back of the machine, where another conveyor goes up an elevator and dumps the roots directly into a bin on a wagon pulled by another tractor.

When Mark Roeter delivered the machine, we were quite fortunate that he stayed around long enough to put it together (the elevator at the rear shipped separately because the unit wouldn’t have fit on his semi-trailer otherwise), and ran me and Ben through everything we needed to know to get it running today. (As with almost all of the 1960’s vintage equipment I have used, assembly and adjustment required a sledge hammer to make it all work!) He told us to expect some frustration in learning to use it, but we put it in the field first thing this morning and were exchanging high fives just a few minutes later.

From the harvest row to the edge of the receiving wagon is about eighteen feet, so organizing fields to facilitate using the machine will take some serious planning, and we won’t be able to use it to its full extent during the season. Our fall storage crops, harvested at a moment when time is short and labor are both short, are set up to accommodate the machine. We are all very excited!