Capital Press, Agriculture Weekly - Thursday February
02, 2006
By JULIE PENCE, Freelance Writer
BURLEY, Idaho – During harvest, a farmer should be able to
get up in the morning and know he isn’t facing breakdowns.
That’s the bottom-line philosophy behind Pickett Equipment
in Burley, Idaho, a company that specializes in dry bean
harvesting equipment that is sold throughout the world. Make
the equipment as solid as you can, and then back it up with
great service, said Steve Pickett, one of the owners of the
Magic Valley business.
“We don’t want to be second on anything,” Pickett said. “We
pride ourselves on having the best service available. Our
reputation is that we have the best mechanical parts in the
world.”
It was the desire to have reliable equipment that reduced
damage to seed beans common during harvest that launched the
company in the mid-1970s. Steve Pickett’s dad, Paul Pickett,
invented a divider system for the cutting stage of bean
harvest. The idea was to divide the plants in such a way
that the tractor tires didn’t run over the plants. Soon
neighboring farmers who were also raising beans in
south-central Idaho – the seed bean capital of the world –
were asking the Picketts to build the dividing systems for
them.
“Then it got to the point where they were so busy they had
to decide if they were going to grow beans or build,” said
Jeff Kirk, who manages regional and foreign sales.
Building bean harvesters it was, and still is. The elder
Pickett died in 1999, but Steve Pickett continues moving the
business forward. The line has expanded to include six
pieces of farm equipment, including a “sugar beet manager,”
which allows a farmer to thin, aerate, block and weed each
row independently, and a bean combine that Pickett said
amounts to the farmer having a portable mill right in the
field.
The combine, named the “Double Master Plus Combine,” came
into being as a result of a machine the Picketts and company
employees saw when they visited Brazil in the early 1990s.
They saw large crews of people cutting the beans, and then
someone would come through with a piece of equipment that
sucked up the beans more efficiently than anything they had
ever seen.
“When we saw it, we said, ‘We’ve got to bring that to the
U.S.,’” Pickett said.
Hundreds of changes and a few years later, they introduced
it, and sales are good.
“I don’t care what kind of conditions you have going on out
there – mud, vines – this combine will get through it,”
Pickett said.
One of the changes to the Brazilian version, of course,
included cutting the human bean cutters out of their jobs.
Because the combine is specially made for beans, germ tests
on seed beans have exceeded previous germination test
results of other conventional or pull-type combines on the
market, Kirk said.
Pickett said he still shakes his head in disbelief at the
brilliance of the idea they brought home from a developing
nation.
“It’s so simple, and yet it works so well,” he said.
In 2005, Pickett Equipment, which has between 35 and 45
employees these days, sold about 160 machines. On the verge
of expanding, the company currently has 60 domestic dealers
and sells equipment in 12 other countries, too. Prices for
machines range from $30,000 to $140,000.
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