Spreader Spotlight—BBI’s Cricket Vineyard

The Cricket Vineyard from BBI Spreaders is a great example of the company’s commitment to designing spreaders meticulous in their attention to meeting the exact needs of farmers in the field. Cricket is both affordable and dependable for spreading fertilizer, lime and compost in vineyards and orchards.

We based the conception of this offering within the Cricket series on conversations with vineyard operators in northern California, tailoring the spreader to their exact needs in the field. While many of our spreader designs make big improvements upon older generations of equipment and add new capabilities as well, the Cricket Vineyard is a true breakthrough for vineyard and orchard operators.  This equipment replaces inefficient, inconsistent human applications (think: people spreading by hand with buckets) and replaces with efficient, consistent, cost-effective spreader applications.  

While Cricket Vineyard was born in the vineyards of California, BBI has taken this great little spreader to the orange groves of Florida, the fruit orchards of Michigan, Washington, and North Carolina.  Cricket Vineyard is designed with a spread pattern perfectly optimized to cover distances between rows of fruit trees and vines.  Through variable rate technology, Cricket Vineyard can even adjust application rates to the size of particular trees in the orchard.

We gave the Cricket Vineyard a eight-foot-long, four-foot-wide hopper, allowing it to clear low, overhanging limbs when necessary.  The Cricket’s reversible wheels position the spreader for a 50 or 60-inch track, which accommodates the vast majority of vineyard settings.  With this narrow-width track, farmers can easily maneuver the Cricket through narrow vineyard rows and into smaller buildings for storage.

As with any farm, vineyards and orchards must get maximum return on equipment investment—this means that any equipment investment provides greater return based on the number of tasks it can achieve. To set the ROI standard among spreaders for vineyard/orchard applications, the Cricket Vineyard spinners can be swapped for a banding conveyor. This conveyor allows compost mulching of vines or tress in a controlled, specific manner, accomplished by a single operator with greater efficiency by using less resources and time.

The spinners are high-torque, plug-to-tractor, and hydraulic-powered for precise, controlled application of dry materials. A banding attachment for the spinners is standard. This attachment allows the operator to apply in a band or in a broadcast pattern.

The Cricket Vineyard is built on a rigid, heavy-duty 12,000-pound axle. Cricket can take on any manner of rough terrain.  Elegant in its simplicity, the Cricket Vineyard was designed to work with 30 to 40-horsepower tractors, common in vineyard settings.  Its wide flotation tires minimize compacting of the earth between rows.

Field users may operate the conveyor chain via tractor hydraulics or BBI’s exclusive hub-powered hydraulic mechanism. Either of these sources can power a 16-inch, stainless-steel mesh chain. Operators can stop and start the bed chain at the end of each row, further minimizing fuel and material expenditure in the field.

Learn more about the Cricket Vineyard series on its product page at BBISpreaders.com.  You’ll see from the detailed listing of this fine little spreader’s features and benefits that we truly thought of everything when we built the Cricket Vineyard, a great example of how customer-focused design equals optimized field performance.