Grape / Berry Harvesters For Sale

About Grape & Berry Harvesters

Every plant that bears fruit is different, which is why mechanized harvesters are tailored to the fruit they pick, including models specifically optimized for harvesting grapes and berries.

Grape Harvester Features

Grape harvesters quickly and efficiently produce loose grapes suitable for use by wineries. They must not only handle the fruit gently to prevent damage and loss, but must also preserve the fragile grape vines so they can continue to produce year after year. Harvesters for grapes can be either self-propelled or trailed units, like harvesters for other crops. It’s important to buy a model that fits your vineyard’s row spacing.

Common features among grape harvesters include a picking head designed for the task, as opposed to harvesting berries or other specialty crops. Most heads employ shaker rods that sway back and forth to induce bunches of grapes to fall off the vine. Falling bunches are caught by hinged catchers or moving collection baskets before they hit the ground, and conveyed by belts through one or more cleaner mechanisms. The cleaners use fans, mesh, rollers, and/or mechanical fingers to remove some or all of the MOG (material other than grapes), which includes leaves, the rachis or “backbone” of a bunch, and sometimes even the stems from each grape. A harvester that can sort MOG and de-stem is said to be capable of selective harvesting. Finally, the grapes go into a storage hopper and are occasionally dumped into a gondola trailer, or onto a conveyor to offload the fruit into a separately towed bin (this is called “non-stop harvesting”).

Berry Harvesters

Harvesters for blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and other berry fruit have much in common with the grape pickers described above. However, self-propelled berry harvesters often have platforms for human pickers to ride along and sort the fruit into storage trays or totes instead of large hoppers. These machines must be even gentler with the crop because many berries are more delicate than grapes and are intended to be kept whole for sale.

Another difference involves the additional types of picking heads available besides the sway style that both berry and grape harvesters use. Some manufacturers’ alternative heads insert rods between the branches of the berry plant and agitate them either side to side or up and down. Berry harvesters use cleaning systems similar to those used by grape harvesters, but some have a fluid bed cleaner to help separate debris from the fruit.

For both types of harvesters, buyers look for basics such as tight turning angles, good fuel efficiency, operator comfort and visibility, and easy washing after use. Recent innovations include remote diagnostics, touchscreen controls, automatic leveling/height/row centering, color cameras, traction control, and auto engine speed control based on load.