Optimism Building For Robotic Apple Picking

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Labor is still one of the major issues plaguing apple growers, especially during harvest. For years, projects to automate apple picking have failed to commercialize. Executive director of the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission, Ines Hanrahan, says she’s encouraged by the recent developments with the robotic harvester from advanced.farm to succeed where others haven’t.

Hanrahan… “We figure it takes between 50 and a hundred million dollars of investment. And most of that you cannot have in three years, right? So a lot of the investors, they don't like that because they want to have a sellable piece of machine in three years, and that's just really not, that's not feasible. This is not working very well. And then the other thing we had is a lot of times people came to us with actually a piece of machine that was already done. Instead of coming to us first, looking at everything, talking through everything, and then co-creating something together with us. And that's what Advanced Farm did different, they did this the right way. Then the next thing is that because you, when you talk with investors, you have like a certain pitch that you make. You cannot use the same pitch with the growers. You have to be with the grower. You have to be honest because they'll see right through it. And also then they won't give you the information that you actually really need to make your company successful because they don't trust you. And so we told them that from the beginning and to actually listen to us, which is not normal. Most engineers, they, while they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, they don't really listen, but they did listen. And so that has really helped them.”

That’s Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission Executive Director Ines Hanrahan.