Did you know there are over two billion apples grown in the UK each year? Picking, collecting, packing and delivering these apples can be an expensive task. Harvesting soft fruits such as blackcurrants and raspberries provides an even more complex challenge, due to their nature and short shelf-life. Traditionally, people have been employed to carry out these manual mundane tasks, but this is often unreliable, extremely seasonal and does not provide the continuity of employment people seek.

SFM Ltd recognised this problem back in 1985 and began to produce high-quality fruit-harvesting machinery. Their success has taken them from the UK to the world’s leading designer and manufacturer of advanced fruit-harvesting machines. With this success came demand for more machinery, bespoke harvesting equipment and innovative energy-efficient machinery.

Having dealt with various applications within the agricultural sector, our team of hydraulic engineers worked closely with the SFM technical team to provide a bespoke kit of hydraulic parts coupled with electrical controls to suit each machine.

Most recently, the kit of parts was sourced from four members of the Group, which included gear pumps, gearboxes, motors, control valves, steering units, steering valves and electronic controls.

During the design stage of a new machine or new generation machine, the technical team met with our Chief Technical Engineer to explain the application and their requirements. From the vast array of hydraulic pumps, motors, valves, electronics and drive shafts, coupled with our application experience within the field, we can assess and configure bespoke solutions. The chief technical engineer recommended the best mix of parts to meet the pressures, temperatures and speeds of the machine whilst also giving optimum efficiency savings.

Following in-depth consultation and testing, for each machine type a bespoke kit of electro-hydraulic parts is designed, configured, assembled and delivered to suit each customer requirement. A recent innovation has been to incorporate two, seven-bank flow-sharing valves which are used to control five separate conveyors via just a single pump and motor.

• The flow-sharing valve provides an easy-to-install solution with the flexibility of making complex changes to the systems at a touch of a button
• The load-sensing valves ensure that demand for oil is controlled, resulting in improved machine efficiency
• With the help of our application engineers, SFM provide bespoke design and build services to their customers around the world