Today in 1967, US Patent 3316916 A was issued, an invention of Florian F. Dauenhauer and Thomas H. Frazer, for their “Hop Picking Machine.” There’s no Abstract, and all they say in the description is a generic the “present invention relates to improvements in a hop picking machine, and it consists in the combination, construction and arrangement of parts as hereinafter described and claimed.” Which isn’t much for such a complicated machine, but you can get a better sense of it reading through the lengthy full description.