Abstract
Many small macadamia nut orchards are on clay soils. Harvesting is usually done by expensive hand labour, as commercial nut sweepers cannot be economically justified. A compact nut harvesting aid for small farms could greatly enhance profitability. Large macadamia orchards in Hawaii have generally been planted on marginal land with coarse surfaces. The orchard surfaces are too rough for commercial nut sweepers, so nuts must be gathered by hand or shake harvesting. Improvement of these rough surfaces could allow machine nut sweeping; however, very little work with quantified surfaces as related to nut sweeping has been done in the past. A need exists to define minimum top course rock size for the operation of surface sweepers. An inexpensive tractor-mounted nut recovery attachment was developed. It was sized for a 20 ha farm, and can be used on both soil and prepared orchard surfaces. Trials on clay soil showed that it could replace 30 hand pickers. Nut sweeping on prepared surfaces showed that a top course rock size of less than 4·5 cm can be recommended for rough orchard resurfacing.
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