Technology innovators focus on harvest automation

A growing number of pioneering San Joaquin Valley table grape growers are using robots to carry full harvest bins from vineyard roads closest to the vines back to a central location where they are packed into boxes for shipping.

These robots, with the trade name Burro, carry 1,200 pounds of fruit or more an hour, allowing a crew of six harvesters to do the work of eight.

"We are primarily in table grapes, but some of the growers have also used them in blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and persimmons," said Charlie Andersen, CEO and founder of Augean Robotics, which makes Burro. "Six people use a unit, which does the work of two more."

Augean Robotics is one of 13 innovators chosen by Western Growers to receive help launching or scaling in the first-ever Global Harvest Automation Initiative cohort.

The 13 firms will receive mentoring from agricultural and technology companies, facilitation of field trials and publicity of the results of those trials as part of Western Growers' goal of increasing automation in agriculture.

Most of the innovators offer new mechanical harvesters as one of the goals of the Western Growers initiative, which is to automate half the specialty crop harvest in the next decade.

"When we talk with the growers, labor, water and food safety are their top concerns, and labor is the No. 1 problem by a margin," said Walt Duflock, Western Growers vice president for innovation. "At the end of the day, guys don't have enough labor to harvest."

Clipped spinach, spring mix and baby leaf lettuce are already grown in densely packed beds that are mowed, but other specialty crops are largely still hand harvested.

"We're there with processed food harvest because you can beat it up a little, but with fresh fruits and vegetables, you can't do that," Duflock said.

Gonzales-based Ramsey Highlander offers two versions of the spinach, spring mix and baby-leaf harvester that mows the tightly packed beds, which the company estimates reduces harvest cost from 28 cents a pound to less than one cent.

Ramsey Highlander, also one of the 13 innovators, has been expanding mechanical harvest opportunities for fresh-market lettuce growers.

The company's latest line of automated harvesters uses patented water-jet technology to cut and harvest romaine, green-leaf and iceberg lettuce.

"The water jet gives you a sterilized cut and the lettuce has reduced pinking and browning," Ramsey Highlander President and CEO Frank Maconachy said. "The machine is used by Taylor Farms and others around the state and around the world who would rather not be named."

The water jet mechanical harvester costs more than a million dollars but does enough work to earn its keep.

"You can reduce your crew from 30 to 10; it's a significant savings in labor," Maconachy said. "It can harvest 20 acres a day."

Ramsey Highlander also still markets the earlier Headrazor mechanical harvester that cuts lettuces with stainless steel blades and sends the heads up to a wagon of workers who strip and pack the lettuce.

Two of the 13 innovators work with strawberries, among the most labor-intensive crops: Advanced Farm Technologies has a strawberry harvester that uses cameras to see the fruit and a soft gripper to pick it with the stem off, the calyx on and no visible damage, while Strio AI uses computer vision to automate cutting of strawberry runners.

Other innovators are working to bring mechanical harvest that is already common in tree nuts and prunes to a range of tree-fruit crops.

FF Robotics developed a tree-fruit picker that moves 10 times as quickly as the average human picker without bruising the crop.

Ripe Robotics is an Australian firm that contracts picking apples, oranges and stone fruit with its mechanical harvester.

Robotics Plus of New Zealand has developed an automated kiwifruit picker and an apple packer.

Spudnik has machines that automate planting, harvesting, transporting and storing potatoes.

Other innovators are working to bring machine technology to the performance of many farm tasks other than harvest, which still frees up labor.

"We can fill some of the labor gap with nonharvest solutions, like Burro," Duflock said. "After harvest, it's probably a toss-up between thinning and weeding as the next most important jobs to automate."

Earth Rover makes a full kennel of robots: Retriever to select and harvest vegetables that are the right size; the Pointer to count, map and measure the plants; the Terrier to find and kill weeds; and BigDataDog to pull the information together with information from seed to harvest.

Oxbo International builds equipment, including harvesters, for a range of field crops and has developed machines to automate aspects of berry and vegetable production.

Muddy Machines is also developing field robots that can do a variety of tasks, including harvest, while also predicting yields.

Antobot is developing a line of affordable robotics for sustainable agriculture.

FarmWise designs driverless tractors that use machine learning and computer vision, rather than herbicides, to remove weeds.

A benefit of being selected as an innovator by the Global Harvest Automation initiative is the connection it brings to the state's farming community.

"We are looking to Western Growers for further ideas on how our platform can be made useful for growers," Charlie Andersen of Augean Robotics said.

The robotic Burro uses computer vision, GPS technology and artificial intelligence to see and learn the best path within the field from where it is loaded near the harvest to a central location at which it is unloaded and packed for shipment.

"There were 20 units out there last year; we're about to ship 70 more units, which will make 90, all of them in California," Andersen said.

The Burro costs $12,000 each, with a minimum purchase of six units. There is an additional annual charge of $2,099 for software upgrades and service.

(Bob Johnson is a reporter in Sacramento. He may be contacted at bjohn11135@gmail.com.)