09/27/07 The Good, The Bad & The Fruit Harvest

The Good, the Bad & the Fruit Harvest. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Do you want the good news or the bad news? Okay, good news is the weather has been great&bad news&labor is getting tight. That's how Jim McFerson with the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission sees it. MCFERSON: I'd say this is a very good harvest but as you certainly have seen  read  heard, labor shortages are beginning to take their toll. So we probably couldn't have had better weather conditions, beautiful size, beautiful quality fruit but a lot of operations are 10, 20, 30% short of labor, so we're kind of falling behind. It's a pretty stressful harvest even though the conditions are excellent; it's a moderate crop, etc. Luckily prices are great so everyone's in a good mood. Yesterday we talked about the new research orchard that WSU just dedicated and McFerson says it's an important new facility. MCFERSON: We're working hard on alternatives and that is certainly not the solution but it's one of the approaches our industry needs to take is to improve the productivity of labor and make the workplace safer and more attractive. So this research orchard is going to be a focal point for a lot of work on automation in the orchard of sensors and robotics as well as the more traditional entomology, IPM and plant breeding. Automation is an area the industry is spending a lot of time and energy on. MCFERSON: Our overall outlook is the old crawl, walk, run thing. Attempting to do harvest, automated is the biggest challenge. It's the big prize but it's also the hardest thing to achieve. What we can do is use platforms and semi-automation for doing a lot of orchard operations that aren't harvesting but still cost a bunch of money. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.