When I was a kid, I used to climb up the ancient apple trees in our garden to pick huge baking apples for my grandmother’s famous apple pie. If you’re lucky enough to have fruit trees in your garden, or if you grow a vegetable garden, then of course you do all the picking by hand. By what if you owned an entire orchard of fruit trees? Would you still harvest all those fruits by hand? I’m tired just thinking about it.

How do farmers harvest their fruit?

 The Tree Shaker

Since the early 1960s, farmers all over the world have been thanking Jordan H. Levin for inventing the hydraulic tree shaker. Back then, America’s beloved cherry pie seemed to be heading for the history books. Why? Simply because cherry-picking by hand was becoming too expensive. Along came Levin, an Agricultural Research Service engineer at Michigan State University. He had the wild idea of creating a machine that would shake the tree to loosen the fruit.

His friends were skeptical, to say the least. “It will cause too much bruising to the fruit,” they claimed. “And it will damage the trunk of the tree!” The first machine that Levin created did indeed cause bruising to the fruit, but eventually he got it right, and now tree-shaking is one of the most popular and cost-effective methods of harvesting fruit all over the world. One machine can harvest an entire tree in seconds!

So what exactly is a hydraulic tree shaker?

There are several different kinds, but the basic idea is that a tractor is fitted with a special clamp that grips the tree trunk. The design of the clamp is very important. It works with a hydraulic system (meaning it uses water to create power), which makes sure that the clamp grips the trunk just right: too tightly and the trunk will get damaged, too gently and the shaking won’t be effective. A net is spread out around the tree to catch the fruit. Then the machine shakes the tree like a lulav, and in seconds, all the fruits are on the net below.

The tree shaker is used for all types of crops, like apples, nuts, and olives. Once the fruit has been shaken from the tree, it still needs to be sorted. Stems, leaves, and bruised fruits are all removed by hand. But the tree shaker gets the picking done much faster, which helps keep the price of the produce down.

 The Vacuum Harvester

While many types of crops are harvested by shaking, some kinds of fruit get too badly bruised for this method. Think of an apple falling from the upper branches of the tree onto the net on the ground. Ouch! The apples that are shaken aren’t likely to end up in your fruit bowl. Instead, they get turned into things that don’t need picture-perfect apples, like apple juice and apple sauce.

So what do the apple growers who grow apples for the market do?

At the moment, they need to pick the apples by hand. Poor things.

But a California-based company is working on a vacuum harvester that will pick apples without bruising them. The machine is basically a giant vacuum. It’s fitted with a camera that scans the tree, looking for apples. When it finds one, an arm-like vacuum sucks the apples off the tree. The vacuum harvester is still being tested, but apple growers should be able to get their hands on the machine sometime soon.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha Jr., Issue 744)