An asparagus harvester.

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The Asparagus Harvester - an agricultural invention

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We finally had a machine that did a pretty good job of harvesting asparagus.  We had a self-propelled, three row asparagus harvester that was 18 feet wide, 22 feet long, and tipped the scales at 10,000 pounds. It was powered by a 100 horse power turbo charged diesel engine, had a 160 CFM air compressor, and was propelled by hydraulic motors in the front wheels.

I had been talking to Green Giant foods in Washington about the harvester. Green Giant told me that if my machine could harvest 60% of what the hand crews did they would switch over to mechanized harvesting.  Wow.  If Green Giant bought enough machines to harvest all of their asparagus I would be able to retire.

We took the machine up to Pasco Washington and Green Giant gave me an acre in one of their older fields.  I was to harvest side by side with a hand crew and Green Giant would compare my results with the hand crew.  Each day that I harvested I would put the harvested spears in a plastic crate and take it to the grading shed.

During the harvest no one from Green Giant ever came out to watch the machine, a fact I though was a little odd.

Once the field test was finished, I obtained the grading reports from Green Giant. According to the grading reports the harvester had recovered 104% of what the hand crew did.  So where was Green Giant?  

When I finally spoke to the people at Green Giant about the results, they told me that Green Giant had decided to stop growing asparagus themselves, and would just be buying it from local small growers in the future, so they had no interest in the machine any more. They said it had something to do with water rights.  I don't remember exactly.

Now I had dragged the harvester to a few Agricultural Farm Shows in Stockton and Tulare, and I knew small farmers were not interested in the harvester.  A lot of the small growers expressed interest, but no one wanted to be the first one to try a mechanical harvester.

I hauled the harvester back to Geiger Mfg. in Stockton, and in June of 1984 we parked the harvester in a shed in the parking lot.  The project was over.

During my stay in Pasco I spent some time visiting with a friend of mine, Kim Haws.  I met Kim in Stockton while he was demonstrating his experimental asparagus harvester in the San Joaquin Delta.  Asparagus harvester inventors should stick together you know.  Kim had been helping me run my harvester while I was up there.

While visiting Kim, he had showed me another invention he had come up with. He called it a "hot water saver".  It was a clever device, and he had obtained a grant from the department of energy to have Battelle Labs do a field test on some prototypes.  It saved a tremendous amount of energy when connected to a water heater.

Kim didn't want to pursue the invention himself, but wanted to have someone else market it for him and just pay him a royalty.

Since the harvester project was dead, I thought it might be worth pursuing...I didn't have any contingency plans for the harvester projects demise, so I called another friend of mine and convinced him to fly up to Pasco and take a look at the device.  He was very impressed and we decided to put together a company to manufacture and market Kim's "Hot water saver".

Perhaps my next invention story will be about the Hot Water Saver.

New Life for the Asparagus Harvester Invention

Lets now jump to the year 2001. A few years ago I had moved from Stockton California to Lake Oswego, Oregon, a small town near Portland.  I still visit Stockton frequently since my children still live there.

 I own a small part of what was my fathers farm in Stockton.  I was out at the asparagus packing shed getting a crate of asparagus to take back to Oregon.  The grower who farms the land for us was complaining about how expensive the labor had become to harvest asparagus.  My ears picked up.

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