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Harvest Time

Harvesting cucumbers in Belarus, Soviet Union

Harvesting cucumbers is a back-breaking job. The plants are very low to the ground and planted close together. Once, cucumber pickers would drag bags and baskets along with them, and by the end of the day, their backs were aching beyond anyone's ability to describe. Huge, modern cucumber picking machines, like those used in the U.S., are totally out of financial reach for small farmers, but farmers in Belarus are creative and can use things on hand. Things like the family tractor, an inexpensive conveyor belt, and especially, some hard-working friends, field hands and family members.

The machine

If you don't have a huge farm and can't afford a huge machine which will automatically pick, clean, and collect the crop, you use something smaller and cheaper. For this small farm owner in Belarus, the answer is to have a tractor-drawn frame on which family members, field hands, and helpful friends can lie close enough to the ground to pick the cucumbers from the plants.

The planted area

The area which has been planted has been designed for this machine. A lot of planting area is sacrificed to provide a path for the tractor.

Field to belt - belt to bucket - bucket to truck

There is hardly enough machinery involved to call this a "machine". The only moving parts, aside from the wheels on which it rolls, are two a 7.5 meter-long (approx 22 ft) conveyor belts which carry the cucumbers to the middle. When they reach there, they fall onto a bucket. One of the family members then carries the bucket to an awaiting truck.

How to pick a cucumber

in order to pick the cucumbers, a worker lies on a well-cushioned "bed" behind the conveyor belt and picks the cukes as they come into view under the conveyor. He then puts the picked vegetables onto the belt and waits for the next plant to come into view. The machine also provides music to make the long hours of work more bearable.

Even on a small farm, the picking can continue for days.

The picking frame carries 10 pickers, riding approximately 30-40 centimeters (12-16 inches) off the ground There is one tractor driver, one relief person, and one person to carry the buckets to the awaiting truck. The tractor drives at an average of about 1 kph (approx 2 mph)in order to give the pickers time to judge which cucumbers on the plant are ready to pick, and pick them. When the field is completed, the unripe cucumbers have had a chance to ripen, and the process starts again.

In fact, this method is much better for the plants than the use of large harvesters, because it doesn't damage the plant in the process. It allows for the cucumbers which are not quite ready to be picked to have more time to ripen. This has also actually increased production from each field, and made cucumber farming more profitable for the small farmer.

Actually, this is not totally an invention of a creative Belarus inventor, but an adaptation. Even today, and on even the largest tobacco farms in the U.S., you can see such devices used to plant the tender shoots of tobacco plants. A tractor pulls a frame on which people lie and push the young plants, barely an inch high, into the freshly plowed soil.

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References for further feedback:
I searched the internet for further facts and information, but all I could find were copies of the same information and the same pictures. The most complete set of information can be found on:
Belorussian Technical Development Site (English version)
This site also has a video of the process, in Russian, but is visually easy to understand.