Harvest Buddy 2.0: Mechanizing Kelp Harvesting

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This is the, the Harvest Buddy.

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Harvest Buddy 2.0, the second version.

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This was developed as part

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of the RPE grant that came to Kodiak.

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This harvest buddy is a 16 by 10 foot dumb barge.

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And so it's a, it's a pontoon pontoon barge.

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And this is our, our harvest and test rig.

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We built this to try and, um, mechanize kelp harvest,

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and then test new technologies and techniques.

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It's pretty simple. We start with a, uh, a forward roller

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up here that has, uh, has a U shape to try

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and keep our, uh, our grow line within the, uh, the specs.

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We then, uh, pass over the top of a bag launcher

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that's hydraulic, and the line, the kelp line is pulled up,

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up this chute up into here where we have a, uh,

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a spinning blade mechanism that cuts our kelp.

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Uh, we do, uh, what's called a leaf cut

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because most of our kelp right now goes to a, uh,

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a grade a food market.

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And the food market wants us to

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separate the hold fast in the blades.

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The kelp blades are cut up there on

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top on the spinning blade.

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Uh, they fall down the chute right back into

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our brailer bag here.

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And we stuff these brailer bags, full kelp.

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So after the line passes up over the top,

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it goes up over top of a roller right here, twists around,

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goes back over another roller changes angle comes back down.

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And then this is

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where we're currently stripping our hold fast off.

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Uh, it's not ideal,

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but we are, uh, we're pretty limited on space right now.

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And so ideally we would be capturing these hold fast

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and, uh, being able to, uh, bring those to market as well.

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So after we strip our whole fast, we come back to

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our, our reel.

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And this reel is a little bit different.

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You can't really see it,

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but it's designed, um, to have removable cores.

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And so kind of one of the concepts

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behind the harvest Buddy was to maximize efficiencies.

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One of the things we identified was is when you fill a core

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up, you have to take all that line back off.

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And so we came up with the idea

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of having the cores removable and, and replaceable.

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So once this fills up, we can dump it out

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and we can plop a brand new cord in there and keep going

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and minimize our time.

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Our downtime between harvests,

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everything's hydraulically driven

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and we started out with a pretty large power pack,

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a 28 horsepower power pack with a, uh, 45 gallon tank,

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which, uh, makes it so

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that we can harvest pretty much all day long.

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Um, this year we're kind of experimenting with trying

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to downsize the hydraulic system.

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So we are working with only a five

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horsepower, uh, power pack.

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And so kind of the idea is to see if we can get to a point

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where maybe we can electrify this system.

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But currently we are using hydraulics.

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Um, on the other side

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of the boat we have a a three valve bank.

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One valve runs the reel

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or the drum one, uh,

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one valve runs the spinning blade cutting machine,

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and the third one runs the, the bag dumping system.

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So once we've filled the bag up, we have a lid

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that goes on top and uh, somebody's able to able

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to flip the switch and has little dogs that turn

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and the bag automatically drops.

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So, and once the bag drops, it's a pontoon vessel.

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So we have a, a void down the center and the bags.

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We push the bags down through the middle of the boat

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and that's where we're able to store the bags

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as we go up and down the lines.

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And then once we've filled up enough bags, when we get

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to the end, end of the uh, set, we'll tie those bags off

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and uh, they'll sit there

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and wait till we have a tinder that comes

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and pluck them, plucks 'em outta the water for us.