Robots May Become Essential on US Farms

This undated image provided by Ramsay Highlander, Inc., shows company technicians operating a mechanical harvester on a lettuce field in the Imperial Valley near El Centro, Calif. With authorities promising tougher border tactics, farmers who rely on immigrant labor are eyeing an emerging generation of fruit-picking robots and high-tech tractors designed to do everything from pluck premium wine grapes to clean and core lettuce. (AP Photo/Ramsay Highlander, Inc. ) (AP)

A prototype was tested last month, but it is still a few years from being ready for widespread commercial use, said Ted Batkin, a grower and president of the citrus board.

A set of scanning and harvesting units will likely cost about $500,000 when the equipment reaches market, Morikawa said.

Elsewhere, a team led by wine specialists at California State University, Fresno, is working on an automated picker to further mechanize the wine-grape business.

Growers of low- and mid-grade wine grapes already use mechanical harvesters, but picking and sorting premium grapes still requires a human touch.

The new technology includes a device called a near-infrared spectrometer, which measures the sugar levels and chemical content of grape samples before they are picked, Wample said. The data is then plotted to a global positioning system map, which a mechanical harvester uses to navigate the vineyards and pluck specific bunches at ideal ripeness.

The system has been under development for the past four years and is being tested in vineyards. The approximate cost of the two components is $230,000.

Salinas Valley-based Ramsay Highlander sells machines that partially automate lettuce picking by using band saws or water knives to cut the lettuce from the earth and convey it into bins for cleaning and processing.

The company is nearing completion on a new model that picks, cleans, cores and packs lettuce and other greens, chief executive Frank Maconachy said. It will likely cost between $250,000 and $400,000, he said.

"Because of the immigration issue, migrant workers are becoming a difficult entity to find," Maconachy said. "If growers have a crop that needs to be harvested and there aren't the people to do it, they'll need to find a mechanized way to do it."

Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis, said it was still unclear if heightened immigration enforcement would drive away enough workers to justify huge expenditures by growers on new machinery.

And the number of variables involved makes it difficult to determine how much, if anything, growers could save by switching to automated systems.

But some growers are excited by the prospect of having robots and a few trained technicians who know how to operate them replace the droves of manual laborers they currently depend on.