"Tomatoes typically bear fruit in clusters, requiring robots to pick the ripe ones while leaving the rest on the vine, demanding advanced decision-making and control capabilities."
At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)?
This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" -- I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for.
Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort of thing is already in place.
Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like in the future?
> I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for.
> Is this already being done?
This is, indeed, already something that is done. As I understand it, for tomatoes it's typically for canning varieties, but they're called determinate cultivars[1]. Even with those, I know in processing you still have to discard the occasional fruit that isn't ripe.
I imagine this kind of technological solution would also be more useful when picking tomatoes for use as the fresh fruit.
They are doing this now actually for plant breeding! "Engineering crop flower morphology facilitates robotization of cross-pollination and speed breeding" covers one example by breeding flowers to be more easily pickable by robotics.
There is plenty of fruits (Pawpaw, loquat, soursop come to mind) that are really not grown at-scale commercially in the US due to spoilage, easy to bruise, or other similar issues.
Loquat cardamom jam is pure sex on a buttered english muffin. Probably the most satisfying flavor I've ever consumed, certainly there is no more satisfying flavor. Sadly just as my tree started producing bumper crops a historic freeze killed it.
They're called "processing tomatoes" and it's a very interesting crop and industry. Bred for a narrow ripening window, to be machine harvestable, and shippable in massive bulk.
Will they manage to make mass produced tomatoes when worse than they are now? Seriously they're so bad, they're not even worth purchasing in my opinion.
They are very clearly not. Humans are good at some things, like recognizing fruit in clusters. Robots are good at different things. Shifting from easy for a human to harvest to easy for a robot to harvest is both in theory and practice a radical change.
But the same things benefit both. And often "human" harvesting just means humans driving farm equipment, which are now basically totally automated.
Things like growing crops in rows. Things like grape vines being trained into rows. Things like nut trees bred so they shed their nuts when shaken by a mechanical shaker.
These things are the same, it's just how automated we go.
I've spent over a decade in the agtech/robotics space here in Norcal and everyone seems to have an opinion, until you actually go out to where our food is grown and find out it's already highly automated, robotic, etc. It's just not sexy in the VC tech way we need it to be to be cool to talk about.
Go to a modern farm, see how intertwined tech, farming, biology, all is. It didn't get this way overnight.
Put another way. What improvements to plants to benefit human harvestability can you think of wouldn't also improve robotic harvestability?
> What improvements to plants to benefit human harvestability can you think of wouldn't also improve robotic harvestability?
I could be totally wrong about this, but the first thing that occurs to me would be something like inconsistent polyploidalism in something like strawberries. It makes larger fruits that are easier to spot and visually recognize, easier to grasp for human hands, but their inconsistent sizes and shapes could mean that they are less able to be "machineable".
It seems like growing strawberries that are more likely to be of consistent size / shape would be better for machineability -- even if it means the average fruit size is smaller.
Kindof like when my son raised chickens for 4H -- he wasn't graded on the size of his largest chickens, but rather whether or not he could grow a flock of chickens that were all consistent in size / weight.
At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)?
This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" -- I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for.
Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort of thing is already in place.
Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like in the future?