Electrify a mobile vegetable harvesting platform
Problem statement
Imagine yourself on a hot day in the summer, overlooking a field of ready-to-harvest crops and with nothing but your upper body strength and mobility to collect them all. This description is the experience that many small farmers endure to harvest their produce manually, some for many acres of different crops. While vegetable farming is a profitable venture, the harvesting process is extremely labor-intensive, involving bending, lifting, and stooping, along with transportation by foot. There are few established solutions for this manual process because these farms are too small for larger equipment to be economical or practical. However, Small Farm Works found a machine that performs well for the defined circumstance: the vegetable carrier harvesting platform made by Kanto Noki, a Japanese company. A gasoline engine originally powered it; however, the engine did not meet US EPA and safety standards, so the platform was imported without one. While Small Farm Works could have replaced it with a US standard diesel engine, it did not align with their mission statement as a whole. Small Farm Works focuses on providing ease to small farmers and doing so with as little carbon emissions as possible and, as they state on their website, “no fossil fuel or noise.”[1] The last team that worked on this project finalized the proof of concept; however, the design and ergonomics are far from commercial standards. Our team’s specific focus is to refine and advance the existing electrified harvest platform design and control system by relocating the electrical components, re-evaluating the battery system, adding a charging method, installing a battery monitoring system, and creating an easier to use control interface to make the vegetable carrier more user-friendly. Some important considerations we must include are accessibility, cost, and safety. Of these, cost affects the end user the most, as many farmers would have to use a significant amount of profit to purchase the platform if cost is not kept to a minimum. Ultimately, our goal is to ease the process of harvesting for small farmers and make the tool as sustainable and economically viable as possible.
Team members
Joan Chen – leader
Rysa Weigel-Sterr – communicator
Kevin Richard Karras – accountant
Adam Judd – admin
Client
John Hendrickson, Small Farm Works