How To Cover 6 Acres With Bird Netting

How To Cover 6 Acres With Bird Netting BIRD CONTROL Placing netting over 6 acres of grapes is just a 1-day job for Jasper Tucker thanks to the hydraulic netting system he built “I knew I had to have some kind of machine because the rows are long and you just can’t do it by hand ” says Tucker who has a vineyard near Dixon New Mexico He and his wife knew that without netting birds would harvest their grapes before they could They couldn’t justify a $40 000 netting machine so Tucker built his own He used a piece of thin-wall 1 1/2-in dia steel pipe to hold the 14-ft wide netting He mounted a pillow block bearing on one end of the pipe and a hydraulic motor at the other and then added speed control to the hydraulics on his tractor The roller quick-taches to the front-end loader on his tractor “When I’m rolling the net off the pillow block drops into a saddle and makes the pipe freewheeling to get it off When I pick the net up I put a pin through the pipe and use the hydraulics to turn it ” Tucker says About mid-August he backs the tractor down the rows to unroll the netting over the vines At harvest time he manually loosens the netting off the vines and places it in the rows A couple of helpers lift and hold tension on the netting as he rolls it up The speed controller is important he says as he goes slower and faster depending on how much netting is already on the pipe Altogether he fills about 20 pipes that store in a relatively small area He numbers his rows which vary in length from 60 to 500 ft and he tags the pipes so the same netting goes on each row every time He is interested in hearing from people or companies who want to know more about his netting machine Contact: FARM SHOW Followup Jasper Tucker P O Box 160 Dixon New Mexico 87527 ph 505 579-4388

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