Can anyone recommend a grapple brand for a 50 tractor? I will mainly be using it to remove peach tree prunings from a 1000 tree orchard.
Thanks,
Matt
Hi Matt,
I’m sorry I don’t have an answer to your specific question. But I can tell you what we do, which may give you some ideas.
We cut down old peach trees and sell the peach wood. Anything less than about 1.5" we toss in the row middles, then I just bush hog it. It makes a heck of a racket, but does a pretty decent job of chopping it up. It generally takes a couple passes to get it to an acceptable level.
Of course many people use flail mowers, but I find a bush hog does a pretty decent job. Our row middles don’t look like a golf course by any means, but they are easy enough to walk on and drive on, unless there is a lot of rain. In that case the tractor w/ sprayer causes ruts.
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I’d probably use a rake instead, the grapples I’m familiar with are better for piles of stuff rather than scattered twigs. I just bush hog the trimmings
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Thats interesting. Are you selling the wood to people smoking meat? May i ask how much you sell it for?
Thanks you.
i’ll second the rake.
i use a three point pine straw rake for branch collection. changed how i view the entire task.
if you have the tractor, i can’t recommend it highly enough.
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I sell it for $5 per 5 gal. bucket. I let the customer put as much in the bucket as they want. I offer a bit of a volume discount. If they buy 5 buckets, I give them a six one for free.
Yes, it’s all for smoking wood. Fruit woods are mild and excellent for smoking. Nut woods (mesquite, pecan, oak, etc) are much more intense and easy to over smoke. I’ve sold to a lot of competitive smokers, and that’s what they tell me.
There was a grower in my area who sold by the bin (apple bin) for $145 per bin. But he sold his orchard. I don’t see that ad any more.
Be aware some folks will want you to quote a price for a pickup load. That’s hard to measure because there isn’t a standard size pickup bed, or a standard size load. A pickup load could vary as much as 200% or more. A 5 gal bucket is much more standard. Likewise with an apple bin.
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Another option would be a PTO driven wood chipper to mount on the tractor and to chip the branches in the aisles.
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That might be an option. I will look into it. Thanks.
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If you’re really just pruning, I’d go with Olpea’s idea of driving over them with a bushhog or mower.
If you’ve got big pieces and want to chip, it’s way, way better to just rent an expensive hydraulic chipper for a few days (unless you have enough money to buy one). Otherwise, it’s just way too inefficient and you’ll be chipping forever and ever. If you chip, cut the largest pieces you possibly can and line them up with the “stems” facing the same way so they’re easy to put in the chipper.
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That is so true. Many many years ago, I tried an electric wood chipper. I bought it at a garage sale. The lady said it was fun to use. Let me tell you, it was not fun.
That thing would choke on a twig. It was basically a glorified paper shredder.
Some years later, I had a neighbor who gave me a small engine powered wood chipper that was a rental unit from Home Depot. It was a much more robust unit. As I recall, it had a 13hp Honda engine on it. But the throat was so small, it still made it time consuming. It would eat some decently large prunings, but only if you removed most of the side shoots from the particular branch you were trying to feed into it.
I think the smallest part of the hole was about 4" square. Just too small to feed prunings into.
I’m sure a pto driven unit would be much larger and more effective.
Or like you say, just rent one.
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Homestead Pinnacle, Land Pride, Ignite, W R Long have all been popular on the tractor groups on Facebook. Everything Attachments was really going nuts with their Wicked grapples, then ran into financial difficulty and stopped production and stopped responding to customers who had placed orders with a down payment. They had some financial difficulties with a building expansion they were doing. Eventually reopened, but they left a lot of people feeling uneasy about their business practices. We have a Hud-Son grapple from Hud-Son Forest Equipment we’re very happy with. Ours is production #2, and I don’t believe they’ve made any more, but they did say they’d be happy to make one for us in any configuration we’d like. We were happy to just buy the proto-type / pre-production model they were offering. We use ours mostly to place logs on the saw mill, and it’s handy to remove trees that fall across trails through the woods. At the orchard, when I prune I make the pieces small enough to lay flat in the isle and the 3 point finish mower breaks them down more. We do have a WoodMaxx PTO chipper that is great, but it would be tedious chipping pruning cutttings, I’d lean toward a rotary cutter or flail.
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