What Are Your Favorite Farm Tools? Trevor Hardy Shares 6 Picks

Trevor Hardy surrounds himself with farm equipment of all shapes, sizes, and functions. His operation, Brookdale Fruit Farm, in Hollis, NH, is considered the largest diversified farm in the state and one of the biggest in the Northeast. Among its 850 total acres, 220 are dedicated to vegetables, largely sweet corn, cucurbits, and tomatoes.

"The newest thing from Europe is a vacuum seeder that goes directly through plastic and plants the seeds. For everybody who does early sweet corn, they’re accustomed to a machine that plants the seeds and then pokes holes in the plastic, and the plant has to kind of find his way out. This is completely different. You lay all your plastic and drive this machine on top of the plastic. It uses electric motors, wheel sensors, and vacuum precision planting technology to drop seeds with different-sized beaks and different placements through plastics. You can get as close as 4 cm and as far apart as 40 cm, and you can drop multiple seeds per hole. So, if you’re doing cucumbers or summer squash, you can drop two or three seeds per hole with the same machine."

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Photo courtesy of Forigo Roter Italia Srl

"Doing bare-ground vegetables or plastic culture vegetables, everybody is doing at least a primary tillage, a secondary tillage pass, a fertilizer pass, and then transplanting. That's four passes — time and labor across the field. These reverse-tiller stone buriers can do everything in one pass. So, I can put the fertilizer down. I can get a finish-tilled pass in one pass. It can bury rocks and stones down to three-quarter-minus and also bury a living cover crop at a specified depth that you set, so you can take advantage of a decomposing clover cover crop or something like that and use that natural nitrogen as an advantage for your crop."

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Photo courtesy of Forigo Roter Italia Srl

"This has simplified all our irrigation management with respect to vegetables. Having a machine that can wind up and store all our lay flat hoses, drip headers, and all that stuff on reusable galvanized spools, it's like thread on a bobbin. It picks up and allows you to put that material back down the next year and store it in a nice, neat manner in the barn. That's been awesome because then you can also take the spool off and use it to wind up plastic and drip tape when you're done at the end of the year to recycle it or throw it away. And that's a cheap machine -- like 1,300 bucks. So that's something that's scalable in all different sizes. I've taken those machines and actually built them like a four-row winder, and a lot of people just use them singularly. That's been huge."

Photo by Trevor Hardy

"This is game-changing, as a small irrigation reel can be used in conjunction with a drip system because all the water pressure goes directly to the sprinkler gun. Water pressure is not needed to retract the reel, so larger higher-pressure pumps are not needed. The smaller reel can even irrigate an acre from a garden hose. The reels are more compact, so that you can move them with a Gator or ATV, no tractor needed. Since the operation is as simple as turning a dial for faster or slower, it is very repeatable, with less variation in operation for the help. We get less calls from our irrigation team to help fix things because the reel just works. I wish they had it on larger reels."

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Photo courtesy of Kifco

"This combination allows us to set up overhead irrigation for frost protection and germination, all on a layflat system that we can drive over and not limit the access to the field. This is game changing, as we set up sprinklers and leave them in place. We do not need to move pipes or lines anymore to get into the field with tractors, trucks, and sprayers. We just drive over the layflat hose when the water is not running. The combination of the balanced MegaNet sprinkler, held up by a 5/16 fiberglass rod, and a layflat mainline and lateral system is awesome."

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Photo courtesy of Netafim USA

"This has been a game changer in seeing live soil moisture values and being able to adjust an irrigation schedule live without having to scout or add more hardware in the field. This has been a significant labor savings for our farm and the way we operate our irrigation. It also allows us to record our cooler and refer truck temps and send alerts on one platform, so all our collected data is available live. All modules are geo tagged, so when food safety inspectors want to know what field we are in or where we are recording, this system shows location accurately on a satellite image. The biggest thing is having everything on one platform for vegetable production, making FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act) record keeping easy."

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Photo courtesy of Toro Ag

Equipment has become the "hot topic" in agriculture, Hardy says, because farmers are looking for labor and fuel savings and the added benefit of improved soil health. His favorite pieces of vegetable-specific equipment go a long way toward solving those problems at Brookdale.

Scroll the slideshow above to check out several farm equipment standouts from Trevor Hardy.

Thomas Skernivitz is Senior Editor, Horticulture Group, at Meister Media Worldwide. See all author stories here.

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