Predicting Fruit Yields

Northwest Nazarene University Professor Dr. Duke Bulanon Is a Filipino who received his undergraduate education in Japan and his PhD in agricultural engineering in Florida. He has put his education and his intelligence to work trying to develop technology that can identify and count the number of immature fruit on trees early in the growing season. He is trying to find a very sophisticated camera that can make such determinations. The Idaho State Department of Agriculture awarded him a $90,000 specialty crop grant for the two-year project. “Once we are able to detect the fruit we will then try to make a correlation with the number of fruits that we see from the outside to the total number of fruits in the tree and then try to predict the yield of that particular tree. What is the objective behind making a fruit count early in the game? The objective for the growers is that they want to market the fruit earlier in the season rather than late in the season because they will have a better market price. They could sell it early and secondly they can prepare the post harvest materials. How many boxes and pickers they need. They can plan the crop management early if they if they know how much yield they will get for that particular season.”