Vegetable Harvesters For Sale

About Vegetable Harvesters

Like nut harvesters and grape and berry harvesters, a vegetable harvester quickly brings in a grower’s crop, saving time and labor. They gather potatoes, onions, beans, carrots, beets, and more for the fresh or processed vegetable markets. Vegetable harvesters come in trailed and self-propelled models, and even a few that mount to a tractor’s three-point hitch. Some of the technologies you’ll find in modern vegetable harvesters include auto steering, auto leveling, auto digging depth, and joystick and touchscreen controls.

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Grimme GT 170 Potato Harvester

Root Crop Harvester Features

Root crops grow underground, so a harvester needs to unearth them before it can clean them and bin them. There’s a broad variety of manufacturers for potato and beet harvesters, but a smaller number makes and models for onions, carrots, sweet potatoes, parsnips, turnips, radishes, endives, and other tubers.

A root crop harvester takes the vegetables out of the soil either by digging (also called “sieving”) or top-lifting. Some digging harvesters use discs or wheels to lift crops such as potatoes to the surface, while others use rotary wheels with tines to unearth vegetables such as beets. A top-lifting harvester literally pulls up carrots by their leafy stems.

Next, the harvester conveys the vegetables through cleaning mechanisms to remove dirt, debris, and unwanted parts of the plant. One of the most common cleaners is a chain-link conveyor belt that allows earth to fall through it as the vegetables move along. Other cleaners use fans to blow or suck away debris. Some harvesters chop off stems using cutter sets or knives.

Finally, the harvester conveys the crop into a bunker or offloads it into a trailer being pulled alongside it.

A harvester or support equipment sometimes performs additional operations prior to the actual harvest. For example, a farmer might use a topper to mow the aboveground parts of an onion or potato crop and eject it out of the way of the harvester head. This reduces the amount of debris the harvester has to separate out later. For other crops, a windrower or lifter will dig up the vegetables and arrange them in windrows for the harvester to gather.

Surface Crop Harvester Features

Harvesters for crops that grow aboveground have picking heads designed to gather as much of the desired parts of the plant as possible. Examples of these crops include green beans, spinach, chili peppers, peas, cabbage, and even lettuce. There’s no digging necessary for the harvesting part of the operation.

Aside from a lack of digging, surface crop vegetable harvesters operate more or less like root crop models. They clean the crop, destem it in some cases, eject the debris, and convey it into onboard storage or a separate trailer. Some such harvesters have onboard work platforms where workers can manually reject bad vegetables or sort the crop into totes.

Find The Right Vegetable Harvester

You’ll find a large selection of new and used vegetable harvesters from popular manufacturers such as Allan Equipment Manufacturing, Art's Way, Asa-Lift, Checchi & Magli, Dewulf, Grimme, Holmer, and Ropa, for sale at SpecialtyCropEQ.com.