THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 26, 1996 TAG: 9604260610
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SUFFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
Peanut farming has traditionally been a dusty mess during which farmers run over part of their crop before getting a chance to harvest it.
That may soon change.
Enter the world's first self-propelled peanut combine, a machine that can rumble through a 24-foot-wide swath of peanut plants without crushing them.
The massive peanut harvester was engineered and will be built at Amadas Industries in Suffolk in a venture with John Deere.
Amadas has one prototype on hand at its Suffolk headquarters. A second machine is already sucking up peanut plants, chewing through their vines and roots and spitting out peanuts during harvest season in Argentina.
``I've been here for 21 years and I've been dreaming about building this machine for 21 years,'' said Stan Brantley, vice president of engineering at Amadas. ``It took 21 years to develop the technology and amass the capital to build it.''
Amadas got some of the $2 million development cost from John Deere & Co. Technical support came from the Virginia Center for Innovative Technology. The Amadas engineering team did the rest.
The combines will come in six-row and eight-row models, two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive. Just the four-wheel drive option adds $13,000 to the list price. The top-end model - an eight-row, four-wheel drive version - lists for $198,000. Nearly all of the 25 peanut combines Amadas plans to build this year have been spoken for.
The peanut combine may look like a regular grain combine to non-farmers, but it represents a significant advancement for peanut farming. Bob Harrell, regional director for CIT, estimated the new peanut combine can harvest 125 acres a day compared to 30 acres with standard harvesting equipment.
``The peanut industry has been hit pretty hard with the farm bill and competition from overseas,'' Harrell said. ``This will increase productivity here.''
The new combine can harvest more than 500 pounds of peanuts a minute. In fact, Brantley says it has filled its 7,500-pound bin in 10 minutes during test runs. That's a drastic difference from the way peanuts are being harvested now.
Peanuts are farmed by sending a tractor-pulled digger through the fields. The digger lifts the peanut vines out of the ground, shakes dirt off the roots, turns them upside down and puts them in windrows. They are left on the ground to dry for three to seven days.
Next, the farmer drives a tractor pulling a combine through the windrows. The combine vacuums up the peanuts, the vines and some dirt. The peanuts are separated from the other stuff as they make their way through the machine.
When windrows are not straight regular tractors run over them and ruin part of the crop before it can be harvested.
That's not a problem with Amadas' invention. The harvesting part of the peanut combine pulls the peanut vines up into the combine before the tractor tires get to them. The value of this? Damaged peanuts sell for 7 cents a pound; good peanuts sell for 30 cents a pound.
The value of the peanut combine is also significant to Suffolk. If the peanut combines sell well at John Deere dealerships, Amadas' 140 workers will have plenty of manufacturing to keep them busy. John Deer is the exclusive distributor. Amadas will begin making the first 25 combines within six weeks in order to have them available when harvesting begins in late summer. Plans are to build 50 combines the following year and 100 a year after that. If all goes well, Amadas may even have to add 40 or so manufacturing jobs to keep its schedule.
About 40 percent of Amadas' business comes from making traditional tractor-pulled combines. In fact, it was at an October 1990 farm show in Georgia that a John Deere executive saw another Amadas first - a six-row tractor pulled combine - that made the big farm equipment company want to team up with Amadas.
John Deere will make the powertrains and other innner workings of the tractor and Amadas will make the harvesting equipment. But it will come in Amadas blue and not John Deere green and yellow.
``A small company like us, there's no way we could have supported the powertrains and the technology,'' Brantley said. ``But we have a niche in this market and that's why they didn't want to build it.'' ILLUSTRATION: It's fast . . .
At more than 500 pounds of peanuts
a minute, the new combine can harvest 125 acres a day, compared with
30 acres with standard equipment.
. . . AND EFFICIENT
Because it collects the peanut vines before running over them, the
new combine reduces the amount of damaged goods. Damaged peanuts
sell for 7 cents a pound; good peanuts sell for 30 cents a pound.
Staff photo by MICHAEL KESTNER
Stan Brantley
by CNB