Where are the harvesting and fruit picking robots?
What harvesting and fruit picking robots are already commercially available in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Oceania and in North and South America? Help us find them.
When you ask machinery manufacturers and startups active in the field of farm automation about their holy grail in autonomy and robotisation, the odds are quite high that they will come up with harvesting or fruit picking robots. Fuelled by farmers and growers who are facing increasing labour costs and shortages.
10 to 30% left behind unpicked
Various research has been done on the impact of these labour costs and shortages on growers, their production and the number of crops and fruits not being harvested because of it. Such as the 2021 global harvest automation report and the 2022 specialty crop automation report by Western Growers. The latter concludes that growers across most crops experience labour shortages that hamper their ability to harvest all their product. Two-thirds of apple growers experienced labour shortages that reduced their harvest, and 18% of respondents (to the Western Growers survey) reported that more than 30% of their acres went unharvested due to labour shortages.
EastFruit quotes a report on the global market for agricultural robots by Kenneth Research stating that in 2022, the shortage of pickers was already causing more than 10% of fruits and vegetables worldwide to be left unpicked in fields and orchards. An amount of fruits and vegetables equivalent to annual consumption in the EU.
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Where are the robots?
So, ‘where are the robots to help growers out?’ is what Brian Lynch from Vineland Research is asking to himself? Well, some can be found in Future Farming’s harvest robot catalogue already. When taking a browse there, you will notice a limited number of entries so far. There are more commercialised solutions on the market but the requirement to publish a sale, rent or lease price has been holding manufacturers and startups. A that’s a pity because, as Mr. Lynch also states “growers overwhelmingly see agtech equipment as a capital expenditure.
Ongoing monthly subscription payments are a hard sell in terms of ROI and technology has to be user friendly and not subject to unending updates, as well as easily serviceable’. Trust is another major factor, Lynch states: “trust that the technology does what it’s supposed to, trust that it won’t cause catastrophic harm to the crop, trust that it’s not just another empty promise.” That’s exactly why commercial availability and disclosed pricing information are hard requirements for a listing in any of our robot catalogues.
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