- Future Farming won’t Need Humans, Researcher Says
- By René Featherstone
Western Correspondent
- Forget the old adage about apples and oranges being oh-so-different. In the brave new world the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission wants to explore, oranges and apples have rather a lot in common, namely, the producer perspective.
Jim McFerson, lead scientist at the Commission’s research lab in Wenatchee, returned from a Florida trip recently all fired up about some new devices. Devices that even science fiction writers would have had difficulty imagining not so long ago will come of age when humans are eliminated from farming.
“What are the two biggest challenges in our face right now? Labor and water,” McFerson said. “Hand labor is an aspect in virtually all phases of fruit production, from preparing the trees in the nursery, to picking and packing the fruit. If we expect to continue in business we have to become less dependent on 12-months-a-year labor. Farm labor management issues are social and political; the time may come when we can’t depend on a flow of immigrant labor.”
Farmer robots are closer than you think.
McFerson’s next trip is to Pennsylvania where, in Pittsburgh, he’ll confer with members of the National Robotics Engineering Consortium and scientists at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. At that institute automation exists for tree measurement, field container handling, turf management, ag spraying, and hay harvesting - all that’s left for the engineers to do is the fine-tuning.
“I predict that 10 percent of the Washington apple harvest will be automated by 2011,” says McFerson, pointing out that a small amount of sweet cherries in the state are already mechanically picked for the stemless market. He believes that for automated apple and orange picking, new chemistry will likely be part of the equation. In order to get the fruit off the tree without shaking it like pie cherries are shaken, “certain chemicals will be applied that enhance abscission.” A plant hormone spray will be used that weakens the stem end so the fruit falls easily; it’ll be the chemical opposite of the Stop-Drop that’s been around for decades.
“We’re moving from horsepower as the key to ag production in the 20th century, to brain power as the key in the 21st century,”said Francis Pierce.
Pierce is the recently hired director of the Washington State University Center for Precision Agriculture that had been established at Prosser in 1999. Two major components of precision farming are global positioning information system technologies and miniaturization technologies.
Think of it as possibilities unlimited.
In McFerson’s estimate, Pierce has brought a fresh breath of concepts to Washington’s research community. It’s time to reach beyond the parameters of individual sciences, which is precisely what Pierce is promoting. “Synergy is the key,” McFerson puts it. “For us to move ahead there must be research collaboration across industries. Pierce is a different kind of scientist; I call him an ag research entrepreneur. The research partnerships that Pierce has established can serve the needs of lots of industries, not just apple and orange, but asparagus, mint, cattle, what have you.”
Will high-tech give us the global edge?
Pierce sure hopes so, relating how upset he was on his journey back from Florida: “I was on a United flight out of Tampa, and when I asked for orange juice they gave me a can imported from Brazil.”
“Brazil is hammering the Florida growers,” McFerson explained, comparing Brazil’s cheap orange juice exports to the Chinese and other exports threatening the apple industry. “One thing we realized on the trip is that we’re not alone, that the woes of the orange industry mirrored our own.” McFerson emphasizes that if American ag goes high-tech and thus out-competes the older farming systems in cheap-labor countries, that’s likely to be the case for a limited time only. “It’s impossible to guard technologies... We’ll have the advantage of being the first to know, but that won’t last.”
Five Washingtonians went to the University of Florida, Gainesville, – Pierce and McFerson, and a county agent, a private grower, and a plant pathologist. The fact that the pathologist was along is a telling point, McFerson says. Imagine a series of “pods” set up in an orchard, that is, “a network of sensors.” Not only could those sensors relay information to a central computer in the farm shop about temperature and humidity (to be used for degree -day models, which are risk indicators), but also the sensors could inform about the actual presence and levels of disease and pests.
“The spores of powdery mildew, for instance, could be detected,” McFerson notes. This technology already exists in the form of “a rapid sampling device that’s built by a company called Innovatec, in Richland; the original reason for engineering the machine was for it to detect biological warfare compounds, but it could probably be adapted for ag uses.”
As for the process of automating the farm, Florida is ahead because orange agriculture has fewer challenges than apple farming, McFerson says. “Most of the 800,000 acres of citrus in Florida are raised for processing, and have a harvest window of two to three months. Generally, harvest is a once-over. Cosmetics don’t matter, and it’s perfectly safe to use oranges that fall on the grove floor. “
Conspicuously missing from the high-tech scenario McFerson lays out, is the mention of genetic engineering. But the Commission, he states, at this point does not fund research and development of genetically modified, so-called GMO apples.
McFerson sums up with a word of caution. “The media likes to present new technology as glitzy. We in the industry have to be careful not to get caught up in this.”
