December 2022 - 5

FIRA-USA
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at how harvest innovation is affecting
their operations across fresh products
for specialty crops and an in-depth
view of the innovators who are doing
the heavy lifting by crop type. The
results are available for download at
agharvestreport.com.
" What we found out was that it's a very
early space in automation, " Duflock said
on the panel. " Seventy-five percent of the
startups we talked to have not raised real
capital. No venture capital yet. And the
other 25% have only done an A round or B
round. Those aren't the scale rounds, those
are a couple robots in a couple fields, not
robots wherever we need them. "
Investors like to see multi-purpose
solutions, Duflock said, which limits some
automation in the specialty crop sector,
which has diverse needs and technical
know-how during harvest.
" What I see is, things like weeding and
thinning, where you can do more than one
crop with one robot, are starting to pull
away, get more capital, starting to scale, "
Duflock said. " You'll see the names here
this week, Carbon Robotics, FarmWise,
Verdant, Stout are all here.
" One robot per crop is very unattractive
for venture capital, so we need to get more
capital-efficient for those startups and we
need more effective grower and startup
interaction so we can get this stuff to
market faster, " Duflock said.
Ed Barnes, senior director of agricultural
and environmental research for Cotton
Inc., described the process formerly used
to harvest cotton: someone would drive
a boll buggy, similar to a grain cart, the
harvester itself, and module builder on the
edge of the field to compress the bales. In
all, the process needed five people.
Then about 10 years ago, John Deere
brought a cotton harvester to the market
that needed only one person to operate it.
" The price tag on that is not small. It's a
million-dollar machine, and requires about
2,000 acres of cotton (to harvest to justify
the expense), " Barnes told the audience.
" I'd really like to have a harvester that didn't
require someone to have that much cotton.
We're starting to call someone with 800
acres a small farmer. "
Just a decade later, however, the John
Deere harvester is the predominant cotton
harvester in fields. " When you bring a
technology that will reduce a farmer's
labor, they will invest in it, " he said. Barnes
said a concern in the grower community is
herbicide resistance.
" Many of you are aware that we are
continuing to see an increasing number
of weed species that have resistance to
more than one herbicide, and we're not
seeing any new modes of action since
the 1980s, " he said. " We are coming near
the end of our ability to control weeds
with herbicides. "
The use of those herbicides allowed
producers to move away from tillage
practices, reducing labor, soil erosion and
other issues.
" We look at automation and robotics as
one of the key tools to helping us combat
Naio Technology's Orio robot, equipped with weeding machinery from German manufacturer K.U.L.T., can be customized to
perform various duties in the field. Photo: Naio Technology
escape weeds, and that's a very near-term
thing that we need, " Barnes said.
Go or no go, labor must be
ready
All tasks on the farm are not equal,
said Mojtaba Ahmadi, senior production
automation engineer for the Cal Poly
Strawberry Center. Growers and tech
companies are working to accommodate
needs for automation during high and
low demand.
" There are certain times you need more
labor to do certain tasks, like harvesting,
but there are times they don't, " Ahmadi
said. " ... Sometimes, it's a zero or 100%
situation. You either have the labor you
need to do what you need to do, or it's a
no-go. "
Strawberry growers, however, are very
eager to learn about automated harvesting.
" If you ask them about what sort of
performance they are looking for, they
will really be flexible at the beginning,
because they want to step in and try it, "
Ahmadi said. " But they're expecting you to
understand their needs and get to the point
where that's really helping them. "
While strawberry harvesting is a specific
area of research, growers are also interested
in less time-sensitive tasks, from pruning
to runner cutting, he said.
" You can do that at any time, and
you don't have to finish it like within a
week, you can just keep doing it in the
background, and that would save a ton of
labor for growers, " Ahmadi said.
Robotics vs. automation
Michael Roots, a specialist in field
outreach and education for the Almond
Board of California, said automation has
been a part of almond harvest, which has
increased efficiency.
" We've all talked here about labor being
the key driver of automation and robotics,
and I think not only labor, but the quality
of that labor, " Roots said. " As almonds have
moved into mechanization, a lot of those
processes require skilled labor. "
As scarcity of water is leading to
advances in irrigation technology, rising
input costs is increasing interest in
precision sprayers.
Roots said he's seen a lot of interest in
sprayer equipment, whether fully robotic/
autonomous or equipment pulled behind
a tractor that can sense areas that need less
or more treatment, which saves in labor
costs and wasting costly chemicals.
FGN | DECEMBER 2022 | 5
Another area of interest, he said, is offground
harvest, catching the nuts before
they hit the ground when the tree shaker
sets them free.
" It was really interesting to hear Ed
(Barnes) talk about how they've truly
changed their harvesting process, " Roots
said. " Obviously, almonds have become very
mechanized from where we started, but
we're really seeing changes driven by labor,
driven by food safety and other issues. "
Ines Hanrahan, executive director
of the Washington Tree Fruit Research
Commission, said the biggest advance
in harvesting tree fruit in the past two
decades is bringing movable platforms into
orchards during harvest to replace ladders,
a major cause of injuries.
While the current focus remains on
harvest, the two other labor-intensive
jobs in the tree fruit industry are
thinning and pruning.
" A lot of our efforts have to go into
those areas and we're really excited to
be here, to tell people we're ready, we're
ready to host you, " she said. " We have
changed our orchards and we're ready
to bring you on and help you get your
company going if you can help us with
those three main tasks. "
Hanrahan said it typically falls on the
bigger operations to be early adopters,
which allows smaller growers to benefit
from trial-and-error down the line.
Different business models, such as lease
vs. purchase, can also motivate smaller
farming operations to become involved,
she said. FGN

http://www.agharvestreport.com http://treco.nu

December 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2022