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How To Cover 6 Acres With Bird Netting
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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2012 - Volume #36, Issue #1