Toby McCracken, 36, ran his fingers through a branch of hemp and came up with a revolutionary idea to harvest the crop.
McCracken was in southern Oregon with entrepreneur and business partner Mike Meyer in 2018 to learn best practices for growing and harvesting hemp. When McCracken returned home to Olathe, Colo., he started drawing prototypes.
He designed a series of vertical combs that could strip the bud off the stem in the field. They worked with specialty harvest manufacturer Oxbo to create a patent pending prototype of the attachment called Revolutionary Hemp Harvester Equipment (RHHE) and founded a limited liability corporation of the same name.
Most agricultural combines use a horizontal header. That’s fine for other row crops but not hemp. RHHE claims its vertical header can strip approximately 90% of the bud and flower off the plant leaving stalk and stem in the field.
“Seeing the wet bud in the harvester hopper stripped from the plant is a dream come true for extractors,” Meyer said in a press release. “The trichomes are better preserved, and there is minimal losses in the harvesting and drying process.”
Oxbo built a three-header prototype to be powered by an Oxbo 2430 corn harvester power chassis. The prototype was delivered in early September, and McCracken said it could buck (strip the flower off the stalk) up to 40 acres per day with only two workers. For comparison, he said it can take a dozen workers a full day to harvest 6 acres.
Once the bud is stripped, a conveyor belt moves the flower to the back of the truck. Meyer and McCracken say that reduced the drying time of the flower to about 24 hours, as most of the water is contained in the stem. They’ve also opened a 34,000 square foot hemp drying facility in Delta.
Now that the RHHE’s first harvest is complete, McCracken is working with Oxbo to refine the processes. He told The Daily Sentinel he tried to keep quiet while working on the prototype, but other farmers have taken notice.
“We kept it pretty secret for a while, but a lot of people in the valley have asked,” he said.
