Given the fact that modern farming practices require deeper tillage to achieve maximum yields, Mel had to contend with a whole new crop of rocks that was brought to the surface when he started to work the soil at twice the depth as earlier farmers had.
About 10 years ago, with the help of his friend Perry Gilmour, Mel began to scour the market in search of the best equipment that he could find to pick the rocks from his fields. Often, while meeting over a cup of coffee in the office of Mel’s home building company in Vancouver, Washington, the two men flipped through the ads in the Capitol Press, a weekly West Coast agriculture-related newspaper.
They also shared in a steady diet of going to farm equipment auctions together. The end result was that Mel bought and tried products manufactured by Haybuster, Rock-O-Matic and Harley. Though he did make some progress in removing rocks from his fields, he continued his search to find a machine that could handle the job more efficiently.
the story behind ...
... begins with a stoney field.
"I would have bought this machine
if I could have, but I couldn't find
anything like it ... so I built it."
-Mel Aho, Creator of the RP1000
A New Frontier
Mel and Perry eventually gave up the search, and decided to see if they could come up with a better rock picker of their own. The goal was clear: create a machine that could effectively pick rock from hundreds of acres of land.
Perry worked out the overall design in his head. Experience had shown that this machine would have to pick a reasonably wide swath during each pass. It would have to clean the rock as it was being picked. And, it would have to unload the accumulated rock as efficiently as possible.
The first step was to identify a platform for the rock picker. Mel and Perry wanted to build a self-propelled machine with a front-facing orientation, so they started their search by looking at 4-wheel drive combines.
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