Rocks Don't Stop This Bean Cutter

Rocks Don't Stop This Bean Cutter MOWERS Mowers (31H) 27-2-34 Harvesting dry edible beans in rocky or sandy soil can be tough on machinery. Gary Bowman, Dietrich, Idaho tried several pieces of commercial equipment before he built his own bean cutter out of an old sugar beet topper. "Most bean cutters use a blade or rod to cut off the entire plant below the surface. On our rocky ground, that doesn't work very well," says Bowman. He and his son Brian needed something that would skim the surface and yet stand up to the rocks poking through or lying on the surface. He started with a 6-row Lockwood sugar beet topper designed to beat the leaves off sugar beets and then æscalp' the tops off. He stripped off the scalping unit, which included individual hydraulic motors for each blade, and remounted them on a 5-ft. wide toolbar on front of a Deere 2840 tractor. The scalper was then remounted to 5-ft. long, 4-in. sq. tubing mounted on the front end of a John Deere 2840. A hydraulic ram raises and lowers the scalper as needed. He replaced the scalping blades with flatter, 14-in. discs off a Deere offset disk. The slightly notched discs have a saw tooth effect and also help push the cut plants over. Switching hydraulic lines on every other motor reversed the direction of spin and turned the cutter into a cutter/windrower. "Every pair of discs turns toward each other, pushing their two rows together," says Bowman. "We get three windrows with every pass, and because the unit is mounted on the front of the tractor, we don't need dividers to push plants aside for the tractor wheels." Bowman adjusted for surface rocks by suspending the blade units from a chain and a spring. When a spinning blade hits a rock, it slides up and over the rock, falling back into position and following the contour of the ground as it moves along. "It cuts beans when they are green, which you should do, but it's also gentle enough to cut them when they are dry and yet not shatter the beans out of the pod," says Bowman. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Gary Bowman, 216 E. Dietrich, Idaho 83324 (ph 208 544-2130).

To read the rest of this story, download this issue below or click here to register with your account number.