But, he was on the Mark III version of his invention that would do umpdedump acres a day. At that point he had spent over $300,000 in development costs (this was in 1968-real money then). When I researched the acreage of asparagus versus his stated capacity, there was a market for about six machines on the whole West Coast.
Hardly the market to spend so much in development, support marketing costs, etc.
But, being the pleasant and aimiable guy that I am, I went to the first field trial of Mark III and watched for an hour as it chopped,destroyed and made mush of a couple acres of expensive veggies.
His only comment was that the Mark IV would perform better!
$300,000 of OPM, I presume? :)
(If I ever do come up with something I'm confident will work, I'll build a prototype using scrap metal, used/surplus motors, some homebrew sensors, a "BASIC Stamp" controller, and roll my own firmware. It shouldn't cost me more than a couple hundred bucks, and I'll be using my own money.)