Following is the text from an article I wrote for Rock Spring Farm's Eat Better Newsletter in 2009. The Scott Viner has performed well for us through the years. We've learned a few key lessons:

• The forward groundspeed of the tractor must be close to the speed of the belts that carry the roots up to the cutting knives. This is more important for crops like carrots than it is for crops like beets.
• Weed control is absolutely critical. Nothing messes up the Scott Viner like weeds.
• It's harder than you think to find a tractor operator to drive the bin wagon.

I took the following unedited video at Featherstone Farm in the fall of 2012. They shortened the elevator significantly compared to the Scott Viner at Rock Spring Farm, which shortens the drop but also requires the bin wagon tractor driver to operate much closer to the harvest machine:

Rube Goldberg at Rock Spring Farm Link to Original Post at eatbetternews.com

On Tuesday, we took delivery on what may prove to be a life-changing (or at least, a fall-changing) machine, a Scott Viner root harvester. This improbable-looking device pulls behind a tractor, and places carrots and beets directly into a 20-bushel bin on a wagon pulled by a second tractor.

I had been part of a crew running a similar device almost fifteen years ago at Harmony Valley Farm in Wisconsin, but had more-or-less discounted its applicability on a farm of our scale until I was visiting with David Van Eeckhout at Hog’s Back Farm east of the Twin Cities for a consulting project this spring. He had purchased one last fall, and put away some five thousand pounds of carrots in just over three hours. When he told me what he had paid for it, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the labor savings could pay for the machine in just one year, based only on last fall’s beet harvest at my farm. I called Roeter’s Farm Equipment, in the heart of Michigan’s vegetable-producing country, within hours of arriving home.

The Rube Goldberg device has belts running every-which-way to power more belts, pulleys, chains, elevators, and knives. Everywhere you look the machine has a grease fitting! A rider uses four different hydraulic levers and two more manual controls to steer, control the depth of two different parts, steer the belt that dumps roots in the wagon, and control the speed of the conveyor. Add three wheels and a conveyor that hangs out about eight feet to the side, and enough rust to indicate that it is certainly older than me, and you’ve got something that appears in stark contrast to the fiberglass-clad harvest machinery used in corn and bean fields.

Here’s how it works: a shoe at the front of the machine undercuts the roots at the same time two points lift and aligns the leaves. Twin belts grab the leaves and lift the roots out of the ground, conveying them toward the rear. Two sets of interlocking knives, rotating upwards like gears, grab the leaves and cut them from the top of the roots, which then fall onto a conveyor. The conveyor moves the roots out the back of the machine, where another conveyor goes up an elevator and dumps the roots directly into a bin on a wagon pulled by another tractor.

When Mark Roeter delivered the machine, we were quite fortunate that he stayed around long enough to put it together (the elevator at the rear shipped separately because the unit wouldn’t have fit on his semi-trailer otherwise), and ran me and Ben through everything we needed to know to get it running today. (As with almost all of the 1960’s vintage equipment I have used, assembly and adjustment required a sledge hammer to make it all work!) He told us to expect some frustration in learning to use it, but we put it in the field first thing this morning and were exchanging high fives just a few minutes later.

From the harvest row to the edge of the receiving wagon is about eighteen feet, so organizing fields to facilitate using the machine will take some serious planning, and we won’t be able to use it to its full extent during the season. Our fall storage crops, harvested at a moment when time is short and labor are both short, are set up to accommodate the machine. We are all very excited!

I’m writing this from Little Rock, Arkansas, where I am doing a presentation on farm financials for the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group.  It’s another in a string of presentations I signed up to do this winter, many of them with a focus on issues of scale in agriculture.

For beginning farmers especially, scale can cause significant problems as the business matures. Most of us get into this business to save the earth, get a feel for the soil, or simply to feed people – we don’t get into it to spend time crunching numbers at a computer, manage employees, or track down overdue payments.

Unfortunately – and I have a feeling that this happens to almost all small business owners – those are the very tasks that make or break a business, especially at the point when it needs to take a turn from being run on the constant over-exertions of the farmer and his or her dedicated crew.

So, one of the core messages I try to carry to beginning and expanding farmers is that they need to understand, at the outset, just how much they will eventually need to produce to sustain the quality of life they want to achieve; and since money is one sure way to unlock the flexibility and resources that can sustain an operation and a family, I focus on that.

If a market farming couple hopes to retain a $50,000 profit to cover their living expenses, mortgage, retirement savings, and such (this is a ridiculously low number based on the number of hours and level of risk assumed by most farmers, but I use it as an example because we tend to be a bunch with relatively low financial expectations), and market farms of their scale seem to average about a 40% margin, that means they’ll need to raise about $135,000 of vegetables – and that’s a lot more rutabagas than most of us got into farming thinking that we would be producing.