I have to admit, you seem determined to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Material handling is one of the main areas in agriculture that's pretty well handled. For your machine to be viable you'd need to drastically cut the price or up the payload. You've built an automated wheelbarrow. Novel, but the ag market is mostly made up of people who expect their equipment to both last and be durable enough to survive a bit of abuse. What's the expected maintenance cycle? What happens when it gets overloaded?(Because it will get overloaded. Farmers can't stand not filling boxes) What's your safety margin? What's your profit margin?(If you plan on selling these for 4500 your input costs, including labor, should be about 2250) How top heavy is it? How rough of terrain can it handle? How many can you produce in a week with current resources? How easy are spare parts to come across?
Take the new prototype into Little's JD and talk to their sales and service staff.
Good point - we will swing by Little's soon to speak with them. Believe they cater more towards the landscaping/lawn care segments rather than the AG space. Do you think there could be a market in landscaping?
Re: Material handling being well handled, is that always the case? It seems like there are still a lot of people walking around with buckets, bins, carts, wheelbarrows, etc. on farms to shuttle things back and forth from one point to another right? What if those people had a cart that did the shuttling, and they could just work at the pick point? Could that have value in some applications? We look at an industry like table grapes, where it appears that about 15-20% of the labor in picking is shuttling picked produce from pick point to collection point. If Burro worked there at least, it would have value we believe, and there are over 120K acres in the US and a crop worth something like $1.8B. Off base?
Re: expectations, it seems like much of your point is that our machine will be too expensive, too fragile, not carry enough, not be able to cross rough terrain, and that AGR will be unable to produce it or service/support it. On the cost portion (the other points seem very solve-able) would you pay 3-4K for something like
this though? That particular machine has a 750 pound payload, but requires an operator and can't shuttle itself back and forth.
Does something that shuttles payloads back in forth at least sounds like a handy thing for some applications where you have to pick something, shuttle it back somewhere, and then come back to keep picking? Sounds like your answer is no.
