MACHINE PICKING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 January 1944, Page 5

MACHINE PICKING

SPEEDY METHODS ADOPTED IN AUSTRALIA CANNING OF PERISHABLE VEGETABLES. HUGE QUANTITIES HANDLED. The production and canning of perishable vegetables entirely by machan,isation is operating at Cowra, 200 miles west of Sydney. Agricultural experts say that the methods employed. will even out Australia’s alternate gluts and shortages. The field officer of the New South Wales Department of Agriculture (Mr John Douglas) said that before the war Australian vegetable production came mostly from small market gardens. War-time demands made it obvious that production must be stepped up a hundredfold This officer and other experts went to the United Slates and brought back special seed, modern sowing, cultivating, harvesting, canning, and dehydration equipment. Results are now being seen at Cowra. The machinery, brought out under lend-lease, is hired to vegetable farmers at low rates by the War Agricultural Committee. It includes: the Meeker levelling harrow, which prepares 200-acre pea paddocks as smoothly as for a lawn, the rotary weeder, which- destroys weeds, but does not hurt pea seedlings; the mechanical mower that cuts the vines off at ground' level and puts them in a neat row; and the green crop loader, which, when attached to the rear of a motortruck and. driven over the rows of cut vines, fills a large truck in a few minutes.

The trucks then run the vines .to the viner, a threshing machine which delivers shelled peas at one end, and pea-hay at the other end. Each viner produces about 10001 b. of shelled peas an hour. The shelled peas are then sped to the cainnery. Peas enter the line for sifting, washing, scalding, and canning, and are in the cooking machine a few minutes later.

Each viner handles five to 10 acres of peas in an eight-hour day, according to crop density. Yields vary from 800 to 25001 b. of shelled peas an acre. The grower gets 3.]d per lb. for shelled peas. The mechanical mower cuts 16 acres of vines in eight hours. A first-class pea-picker picks by harid 20 bushels a day, or about dne acre a week. At one 447-acre farm mechanised methods are applied to onions, tomatoes, and root vegetable crops for canning. A mechanical planter which plants, waters, and fertilises tomato plants at the rate of 30,000 seedlings a day is in use. At one canpery, which has been operating only/three weeks, only the pea line is irf full swing so far. From it tumble 21b. tins of peas at the rate of 75 a minute.