New Hampshire Vegetable Grower All In on His Favorite Farm Equipment Picks

Andre Cantelmo, Co-Owner of Heron Pond Farm in South Hampton, NH, grows 50 acres of mixed vegetables covering all four seasons. We asked him about his best farm equipment. Scroll through the photo gallery below to see his top picks.

"A bottleneck on the farm is the wash and pack house. For a farm our size — a market garden-size farm — they don't make a lot of pack equipment. So most of the time we have these lines of dunk tanks for vegetables. But this stainless steel rinse tunnel washes from both the top and bottom at the same time. If you want, you can turn on the high pressure or turn it up, so if you’re doing roots, something like carrots, or washing bunches of things, like early season radishes, beets, or kale bunches, you throw that right on the conveyor and it keeps the crew going because the conveyor sets the speed. Even in a small footprint, you can just push tons of food through it." (717) 733-2584

Photo courtesy of AZS Brusher Equipment

"We start with onion and run that transplanter all the way through August, so it gets a lot of miles on it. First of all, it's fast; you are putting plants in the ground faster than you have ever put plants in the ground. Second, it's ergonomically great for all of your people because they’re sitting in comfortable chairs, able to plant without destroying their bodies, which is great for crew morale and longevity." ChecchieMagli.com/en

Photo courtesy of Checchi & Magli

"You can never get ahead of those spring weeds by stale seed bedding or any other technique. But using the steam generator, we’re able to direct-seed either in the caterpillar tunnel or right outside for those super-early crops, and they’re weed free and disease free, too. On the other side of the calendar, in the third week of September we start steaming our tunnels where we just ripped out the summer tomatoes for our greens. That could be considered an early crop because we cut those greens all winter and take our last cut of those greens in April. We use a zone controller on it and heat the top 2 inches of soil to 170°F and hold it for 20 minutes. There's no disease or weed seeds present in our crops after that. It keeps everything clean." Sioux.com

Photo courtesy of Sioux

"The cultivators under this tracker are outstanding. We do what's called stacked cultivation. We use at least three forms of soil disturbance per row per pass, so when you do compound tooling, you get exponential weed control. It's not just linear, it becomes exponential when you combine tools." Terrateck.com; Kult-kress.com

Photo courtesy of Terrateck

"Baby leaf greens are an important part of my retail operation and my CSA. People want salad greens. Without the baby leaf harvester, the cost of production on greens is through the roof. It has changed greens production on the farm. I’m harvesting greens two or three times a week. I go out to harvest between 200 and 300 pounds of greens. With the harvester, I can do that before the crew even gets in. What would take me and a crew all morning to do, I do in a half hour. The crew comes in and they’re ready to start washing that stuff." Terrateck.com

Photo courtesy of Terrateck

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

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