We have also spent a lot of time dehydrating, but that has been rewarding too:

This year, we've used our two Excaliburs to dehydrate food, and we've still been hard put to get it all done sometimes without losing our produce.  Lee started looking for an alternative that would do more at once, especially considering that our orchard will be producing well in just a few years.  He searched around and found another project to work on:

He found an article related to an "old" method of dehydrating fruit right in the orchards.  This is going to be a wood-heat powered outdoor dehydrator.  I will update photos as progress goes along.  When it is finished, it should dehydrate 30 bushels of produce at one time.  The ideal thing about this method is that it is tried and true.  It was common practice for many years back in the "olden days".  The practice eventually fell by the wayside.  If we ever lost the power for a prolonged period of time, we could probably dehydrate all the meat in our deep freeze before it went bad.