Field of Greens

Built almost entirely of stainless steel, the Headrazor romaine lettuce harvester shined at the 2008 World Ag Expo in Tulare, CA. The latest machine from Ramsay Highlander, the Headrazor highlighted the challenges manufacturers must overcome when creating mobile equipment for the fresh vegetable industry, while at the same time it showed off the problem-solving and manufacturing capabilities of the OEM and its suppliers.

To stay in business, today's vegetable grower must raise and harvest fresh produce safely (for both the workers and consumers), quickly and efficiently with fewer hands in the field. Fresh lettuce can go from a West Coast field to an East Coast table in under a week. Harvesters, such as the machines built by Ramsay Highlander, are the first step in a bagged salad's journey to a grocery store near you.

Ramsay Highlander Inc. started as a welding shop in 1969. The firm's unique name was adopted ten years ago and combines the Scottish founder's last name with the brand of the company's staple product. The Highlander Harvesting Aid is a diesel-engined, four-wheeled, laterally-moving conveyor for fresh vegetables and fruit picked by hand. President and CEO Frank Maconachy acquired the company from his father in-law in 1997, who purchased the firm from Verne Ramsay when he retired. The company still custom-builds self-propelled conveyers as well as mechanical spinach/spring mix harvesters.

The company calls "America's Salad Bowl" home with operations in Gonzales, CA. Located in the area where most of the United States' lettuce is grown and agriculture is a $3 billion industry, the company works directly with customers to provide solutions for their agricultural businesses.

Much of Ramsay's engineering work is done in-house. "Sometimes we can work off something we have done in the past," says David "Coon" Offerdahl, Ramsay Highlander's vice president of engineering. "But very little of the Headrazor uses anything we have done before. This has become more common in the last few years. Everyone wants something new and different."

Offerdahl and Scott Harlan, Ramsay's director of R&D, usually do not have much of a window in which to take a customer's notes and then design and build a machine. "One of the most challenging aspects in our industry is the short design time," says Offerdahl. "Our customers purchase new equipment based on receiving new harvesting contracts, which may take effect three months after they stop in."

Human energy vs. horsepower

Comparing everything from seed to consumer, California's specialty crops are very different from the corn and soybeans of Iowa. That is especially true during the harvest.

"Mechanization as it relates to specialty crops depends on the commodity," says Paul Simonds, communications manager, Western Growers Assn., Irvine, CA, an organization with 3,000 grower, packer and shipper members in California and Arizona. "What we have in place for apples is far different from almonds or spinach. While a certain amount of mechanization is involved, specialty crops in general are more labor intensive than their program-crop counterparts."

In California and neighboring Arizona, the need for developing technology to mechanize more specialty crop operations has never been stronger. Good help has been tough to find for years, but tightening the Mexican border has made the situation worse.

For a few months each year, leafy green production (vegetables such as iceberg lettuce, spinach, cabbage, endive and romaine lettuce) shifts to the low desert near Yuma, AZ, where 90% of the country's winter vegetables are grown. A successful harvest there depends on 30,000 farm hands on a daily basis. In 2006 the farm industry in Arizona experienced an estimated 30% shortage in workers; valuable crops simply went unpicked. The Arizona Legal Workers Act (known as the employer-sanctions law) took effect January 1 — peak harvest time in Yuma — and is expected to make the labor problem worse. Under the act, employers who hire unauthorized workers risk losing their business licenses.