Celebrating Sweet Potato Month with Harvesters

February is apparently Sweet Potato Month (according the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission !) and there's no better way to celebrate and close out such a month than learning a bit about the history of sweet potato harvesters that help the sweet potato move from the field to our plates.

Sweet potatoes have long been a top crop in North Carolina and the state has been the top producer of the orange vegetable in the United States since 1971.  Developments in sweet potato harvesters that help mechanize the harvest have played a key role in helping NC stay on top as sweet potato producer.  Researchers at NC State have been working on harvesters since the 1940s.

One of the first machines that was developed for sweet potatoes here at NC State was the "vine row harvester" which helped to pull up the sweet potato vines and make it easier to pull the potatoes from the field.  The harvester could be attached to a tractor and easier driven through the field, while simultaneously doing little damage to the actual sweet potatoes.

In the 1970s, more work was done on more fully automating the harvesting process, with a mechanized harvester that pulled up the vine, plucked the sweet potatoes off of it and left just the loose sweet potatoes in the field to be picked up.  A film of this machine in action can be seen here: Sweet Potato De-Viner in Action .  Today, sweet potatoes are still picked by hand, as their skins make them too delicate to be gathered by machines, like Irish potatoes are.

To learn more about sweet potato research done at NC State, visit materials digitized through our digitization project Cultivating a Revolution here .