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Sweet Corn Picker Mounts On Conventional Combine
Michael Mulders, Essexville, Mich., had 25 acres of sweet corn and a combine sitting idle in a shed. That prompted him to come up with the idea of building a 2-row corn picker on the frame of an old soybean header that mounts on his Deere 4400 combine.
"It lets us pick sweet corn in half the time, with half the
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Sweet Corn Picker Mounts On Conventional Combine CORN PICKERS Corn Pickers (11D) 29-1-3 Michael Mulders, Essexville, Mich., had 25 acres of sweet corn and a combine sitting idle in a shed. That prompted him to come up with the idea of building a 2-row corn picker on the frame of an old soybean header that mounts on his Deere 4400 combine.
"It lets us pick sweet corn in half the time, with half the labor, and without spending big money on a commercial picker," says Mulders. His invention was one of the finalists in Farm Bureau's 2004 Farmer Idea Exchange contest.
Everything on the picker is home-built. He stripped the Deere 12-ft. soybean head down to the frame and then mounted the components on it.
The machine works by grabbing corn stalks with a set of belts and using a pair of knife cutters to cut the stalks about 1 ft. above the ground. The stalks, with the ears of corn still attached, proceed up a chute where two small rollers strip the ears off in a downward motion to snap them off the stalk. Once the ears are removed they move on a conveyor belt to a belt bottom, self-unloading bulk wagon. Power is provided by a hydraulic pump that runs off the combine's tank auger drive. The rig has a total of 13 hydraulic motors and an 85-gal. hydraulic reservoir.
"It lets us take advantage of a machine that would otherwise sit idle during the corn picking season," says Mulders. "It strips the ears off in a downward motion similar to hand picking, but with less damage. It took about 200 man hours to build. We spent about $14,000 to build it. A one-row, pull-type corn picker sells for about $30,000."
According to Mulders, the first year they used the machine it saved them about $3,000 in labor. That comes out to about $120 per acre or about 15 cents per dozen ears of corn. "We're trying to build enough customers for our sweet corn so that we can double our acres, and therefore save $6,000 per year," says Mulders. "Using a combine to power it eliminates the need for a tractor to operate a pull-type picker. Another advantage is that some of the workers we had been using to pick corn are now free to do other jobs. It takes less than 45 minutes to remove the picker from the combine and mount a conventional corn or soybean header on it," he notes.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Michael Mulders, 840 W. Hampton Rd., Essexville, Mich. 48732 (ph 989 892-1046).
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