Macadamia nuts are collected from the ground using plastic “finger wheels” at the front of a machine similar to a zero-turn mower. When they roll over a macadamia nut it becomes wedged in the plastic “fingers”. The nut is then picked up and rolled around further until it hits an ejector, which forces the nut free of the fingers and it drops into an enclosed space below. From here a series of augers carry the nut up to a receival bin at the back of the machine. The receival bin can be tilted to empty the nuts into a hopper at the start of the dehusking line.

One major difficulty with finger wheel harvesting is collecting nuts from close to the tree trunks without damaging the harvester or the trees. Our harvester has a sweeper on the left hand side of the harvesting head. The bristles of the sweeper are soft enough that they can brush the tree trunk without damaging it, but hard enough that they relocate the majority of nuts away from the tree trunks to where they can be easily picked-up. The sweeper does have the downside of relocating organic matter and topsoil as well as the nuts. This issue is mitigated by maintaining ground cover throughout the orchard, right up to the base of the trees. Previously, hard to collect nuts were hand raked into the inter-row, which offered less soil disturbance but was very time-consuming.