Fruits & Vegetables A SPECIAL GROWERS’ REPORT OF AG ALERT ® CALIFORNIA
High-tech developers and investors say they hope robotics will assist or replace labor-intensive tasks such as clipping strawberry runners and harvesting.
Automation remains elusive for strawberry farming By Caitlin Fillmore During the strawberry growth cycle, the plant expends unnecessary energy growing thin tendrils, called runners or stolons.
fewer can do it at the economics required for grower adoption,” he said. Brycen Ikeda manages 600 acres of strawberries across 10 different ranches in northern Santa Barbara and southern San Luis Obispo counties, producing 4 million packages for Santa Maria-based Central West Produce. Ikeda maintains a manual runner-cutting op- eration for his 180 acres of fall berries and 420 acres of summer berries. “(Runner cutting) is something that must happen early in the season. If you don’t keep up on it, it will really affect yields and hurt you all season,” Ikeda said. Ikeda’s team uses hand-held garden shears to individually cut every runner. Some of the varieties require up to seven passes. “Runners are the most tedious and labor-intensive task we have,” he said. While Ikeda does not currently use any automated tools for his strawberry crop, he said he has stayed informed about the machines on the market and would be interested in adopting them if they penciled out. Runner cutting costs about $1,800 per acre for Ikeda’s fall crop and rises to $5,000 per acre for summer plants. Labor costs for harvesting can reach $20,000 per acre, Ikeda said. “We pick year-round. Every week I am picking,” Ikeda said. “That’s why the emphasis is on the harvest side of labor. I don’t know if runner cutting is being underappreciated or neglected, but it’s definitely not getting the attention of developers.” While automated strawberry harvests have been slow to take hold, Duflock of Western Growers said investors may see opportunity in targeted robotics that can cut down on labor
Growers employ hand labor to clip the runners, keeping the plant in its fruiting phase instead of the reproductive phase. Cutting runners helps strawberry growers maintain a proper canopy for the plant and encourages more fruit. Yet runner cutting is often skipped because of the expensive labor it requires. Mojtaba Ahmadi, a senior production automation engineer at the California Strawberry Commission, said the time is ripe for developing an automated solution. But at the mo- ment, he said the technologies attracting the most attention don’t address all the straw- berry growth cycles needed to produce maximum labor savings. “We’re not connecting dots between automation investments across the life cycle of the plant,” said Ahmadi, who in 2020 began advocating for automated tools for runner cutting. To date, ongoing technological development to bring automated solutions into California strawberry fields has focused on autonomous vehicles that can use robotics in harvesting. Walt Duflock, senior vice president of innovation at Western Growers, said the strawber- ry producer Driscoll’s “sent a clear message” to investors in 2011 with its investment in a robotic harvester, Agrobot, a berry-picking prototype tested in a strawberry field in Davis. Overall, robots employed in California’s $2 billion strawberry industry remain few. Robotics to assist weeding, thinning, planting and harvest are gaining some traction, but fully automated harvesting remains “far away,” Duflock said. “So far, very few robots can pick with the accuracy of a human harvest crew, and even
See STRAWBERRIES, Page 13
12 Ag Alert February 7, 2024
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