Online Marketing of the asparagus harvester invention.

The Asparagus Harvester - Marketing a new product online.

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Online marketing of the asparagus harvester

I asked the grower if he would be interested in a mechanical asparagus harvester.  He said something like "I'd give my right arm for an asparagus harvester".

Hmmmm.  It was a Saturday afternoon, and I drove into town and over to Geiger Manufacturing.  I had not been to Geiger mfg. since 1984.  When I arrived at the gate to the parking lot, the gate was locked and no one was there.  I got out of my car and walked over to the gate in the cyclone fence and peered through. 

There it was!  Right where we had parked it some 17 years earlier. Wow. I could just see the rear end of the machine. The shed we had parked it in had only 3 sides and a roof, the whole front was open, and I could just barely see the green and yellow platform on the backend of the harvester.

I went back out to the farm and talked some more with the grower.  I wanted to find out a few things like how much it cost to have the hand crews pick the asparagus.  Asparagus is still picked entirely by hand, at least in California and Washington, the two major asparagus producing states.

Back in 1984 the asparagus picking crews were paid about 10 cents a pound to harvest it.  After talking some more to the grower I found out that it was costing more like 25 cents a pound to harvest, and some crews were being paid an hourly wage to pick asparagus.  

Perhaps the Asparagus harvesters time had come!   

I had thought of some improvements that I could make that I believed were patentable.  I checked with the patent office and found that the renewal fees had not been paid for the patent we had obtained back in the early 80's, and the patent had been allowed to expire in the early 90's.

I contacted Geiger Manufacturing and suggested that since they still had the old prototype harvester, and I had some patentable improvements for an asparagus harvesting machine,  we should go into a joint venture or something and make some improvements to the old prototype and try to market it.

Geiger agreed and "Geiger Lund Harvesters" was born.  

The tires were all flat, but amazingly when they were filled with air they held.  The grower for my farm was very excited and we decided to run the machine out on my farm, which now had several hundred acres of asparagus.  Geiger and I spent the next two years improving and testing the machine in Stockton and in Pasco Washington.

Online marketing of the asparagus harvester invention

Marketing an invention has always been far more difficult for me than the inventing itself. I'm not much of a salesman.  But I can build websites. 

I built a website about the harvester.  www.asparagusharvester.com, and optimized it for the key words :"asparagus harvester".   On the web site I placed some videos of the harvester in operation, a spread sheet showing how much it costs to machine harvest asparagus, and some general information.

Next, I did online searches for asparagus growers and anything I could find online about asparagus harvesting machines.  One of the sites I found was the Washington State University's website which had agricultural pages dealing with research into mechanical harvesting of asparagus.

I then sent emails to anyone I thought might be interested in seeing the asparagus harvester in operation.  One of the emails I sent was to the researchers at Washington State University, offering to send a video tape of the harvester in operation and giving them the URL to the harvester website.

A few growers and a professor from Washington State requested the videos and I sent them out.

It turned out that Washington State University was very interested in my machine.  They wanted to see the machine in person.  I arraigned with the grower to do a little fall harvesting since the season was over.  You can cut asparagus in the fall...sort of.  It's not commonly practiced.  I invited the professor and his associate to come and see it run down a row or two of asparagus.

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