by Robert Turk

November 2, 2003: Today I visited Gary Burmasters grape farm as he was harvesting. Gary is a partner with Dean Martin and they farm under the name Fruit Farms Inc., in Sheridan, NY. Harvest has been held back this year as the grapes took a long time to ripen thanks to the unusually cold spring and summer this year. The sugar content is down and by waiting as long as possible it helps raise the sugar by leaving the berries on the vines as long as possible. There is a risk though, once the grapes freeze, harvest is over and the unpicked berries are lost.

When I got to the farm Gary and Dean were just getting ready to start so I had the joy of riding around on the machine for about a hour (and it is a nice view up there). The weather is typical of grape harvest season, rainy and dark. While riding I took a nice shower just learning and talking to Gary who was running the harvester. The harvester is a 1986 Pic-Ryte harvester, which is actually based off the prototype that Chisholm-Ryder designed before they closed shop.

Pic-Rytes web site http://www.wwfcinc.com/html/grapeharv.html .

            Here is a view of the harvester starting into a row of grapes. The auger is sitting over the crates on the tender tractor already in the row. You can see the other tender tractor waiting for the harvester to get moving so he can follow as they are working on filling the last crate on the trailer. Each crate holds 2400 pounds of grapes.

The guy sitting in the crates picks out pieces of wood and vine as well as mice and snakes that get knocked into the harvester. Some farmers have stands welded to the side of the tender trailers for the guys to stand on. Gary doesn’t have any stands on his so this guy gets to sit in the juice till the crate is almost full.

As the harvester runs down the row at 2.5mph, there are fiberglass beaters that shake the vines and knocked the grape berries off the vine and into the collection trays at the base of the machine. These trays drop the berries onto the bucket conveyer that runs up the back of the machine which drops them onto another conveyer that runs them over to the wing conveyer which drops them into the crates.

After the crates are filled the driver heads back to where the trucks are parked. Then they use a probe to sample the grapes in the crate. They sample each crate and put the sample into a five-gallon bucket and mix the samples together. Then they dump the samples into a blender where they mix it to a fine pulp/juice. After its mixed well enough they put a tablespoon of the sample into a paper towel to filter the juice from the pulp. Then they swipe the paper towel onto the glass screen of the refractometer to measure the sugar content. The sugar content is measured by the amount of light that passes thru the juice and has a scale inside that you look thru to see the sugar content in brix. This load of grapes registered a 15.5 brix, which is very good. For the juice industry they want 15.0 brix and anything under that results in less pay so farmers mix their crop from different vineyards on the trucks to get an average sugar content of at least 15.0 brix if possible. Here is the view when you look thru a refractometer as well as what one looks like.

I would like to thank Nova-Tech International for the use of the Refractometer image. You can check out their site at http://www.novatech-usa.com

Here is a picture of the grape probe. It is the long metal stick leaning against the post.

After they test the crates they use a New Holland 4630 with loader to unload the crates and stack them on the truck. This farm is a Ford/NH farm except for the harvester.

TTT November 2003 Page 11

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