Features
Advanced Farm has built robotic harvesters for strawberries and apples, as well as automation equip- ment for packing.
decrease in the availability of domestic workers and the increasing cost of immigrant labor — is forcing farmers to look at alternatives, with the top of the list being automa- tion. “Labor is getting worse and automation is getting better at about the same time,” he says. Progress Being Achieved So, how advanced are the technologies currently? Duflock says great progress has been made on solutions for weeding and thinning, as well as some progress in planting and so-called harvest assist solutions (robots that support crews in moving pallets or crates to and from packinghouses). But while robotics are now widely used to harvest prod- ucts for further processing, such as bagged salads, Duflock admits the place where the least progress has been made is in harvesting fresh produce. “It’s so hard to pick straw- berries or apples with a robot when it cannot be damaged — it’s a high bar for fresh harvest,” he says. “There’s going to be hundreds of weeding robots out there in the next couple of years doing hundreds of thou- sands of acres and something similar with planting over the next five to ten years. The last mile is harvesting fresh product via automation, and it’s hard to put a timeframe on that. We’re able to produce machines that harvest strawberries but not with economics that work for the grower. Not yet.” One of the start-ups working to complete that last mile is Davis, CA-based Advanced Farm, which was established in 2018 with the aim of using robotics to build a better
Burro, by Pennsylvania-based Augean Robotics, can learn paths and retrace them autono- mously, continuously conveying material back and forth.
And the problem is not just limited to North America — there is a similar situation becoming apparent in Europe. “Both are having to pull further south to get ag-workers to come to the country,” Duflock says. He notes this combination of the two factors — the
40 Vision Magazine
October/November 2023
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