Those of you who grow a lot of sweet corn...

[dcross]

How much of your labor is picking? Reason I ask is that I'm looking at a line of machinery: http://www.homesteadingtoday.com/sho...d.php?t=147111 and there's a one row corn picker included that my dad says is perfect for sweet corn because it slices the ears off the stalk instead of "snapping" it off. At most I would be growing an acre or so, but probably not even close to that for a while. It just doesn't seem(to me) that there's enough labor in picking the corn to justify keeping/maintaining a picker.

[chas]

I have never heard of a mechanical sweet corn picker,not saying there aint such an animal .Around here I see acres picked by hand.My 3/4 acre was manageable for me.And equipment has to be kept at a minimum if there's any hope for profit.
Chas

[uncle Will in In.]

If you grow an acre you will have the maturity dates spread out over as long a period as possible. This makes your ear jerking job much less at one time.

[Windy in Kansas]

"Byron" is one brand of mechanical sweet corn picker.

I'm with Uncle Will, if you are spreading the harvesting of one acre over several weeks or a few months you probably won't need a picker. Yet if you can pick a usable unit up for a song, why not?

[Stephen in SOKY]

Mechanical sweet corn pickers are highly specialized. The New Ideas, and the like we use on field corn damage too many kernels for most buyers at local sales. If selling to canneries, the product picked on an average picker becomes cream style corn!

[pumpkinlady]

My husbands family grew and sold sweet corn for about 30 years. They had considered a picker but choose not to. A picker will pick your whole field or rows at a time. If selling the corn you end up with under ripe, over, ripe, and just ripe corn. Your buyers won't be happy with their purchase. If you hand pick you are only picking your best to offer at that time. This leaves you the chance to pick the field over and over as needed. The cost of picker can be costly. If you have a large family you already have your free pickers and it is family time laughing, working toghether and working off dinner. If needed you can hire local kids say for $10 to pick once a day. They are happy with quick cash and you can pick a lot of corn in an hour. When hand picking we didn't drag sacks on the ground. We used newspaper sacks and are able to put 2 plus dozen in the sack and would then dump corn into the wagon that sat in the outside row.