December 2022 - 5

FIRA-USA
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In early 2021, Western Growers
launched the Global Harvest Automation
Initiative to take a comprehensive look
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
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
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
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
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.
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. VGN
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http://www.agharvestreport.com http://bpgrower.com https://www.ackermanequipment.com/

December 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2022