California farm owners watch high-tech helpers develop as immigration fears heighten

LOS ANGELES -- 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.

Such machines, now in various stages of development, could become essential for harvesting delicate fruits and vegetables that are still picked by hand.

"If we want to maintain our current agriculture here in California, that's where mechanization comes in," said Jack King, national affairs manager for the California Farm Bureau.

California harvests about half the nation's fruits, nuts and vegetables -- a huge job that requires about 225,000 workers year-round and double that during the peak summer season.

More than half are immigrants who cross the Mexican border illegally and travel from farm to farm.

Last year, amid heightened immigration enforcement, the seasonal migration was marked by spot worker shortages, and some fruit was left to rot in the fields.

"There's a lot of very nervous people out there in agriculture in terms of what's going to be available in the labor force," said Robert Wample, viticulture and enology program director at California State University, Fresno.

Mechanized picking wouldn't be new for some California crops such as canning tomatoes, low-grade wine grapes and nuts.

But the fresh produce that dominates the state's agricultural output -- and that consumers expect to find unblemished in supermarkets -- is too fragile to be picked by the machines now in use.

The new pickers rely on advances in computing power and hydraulics that can make robotic limbs and fingers operate with near-human sensitivity.

"The technology is maturing just at the right time to allow us to do this kind of work economically," said Derek Morikawa, whose San Diego-based Vision Robotics has been working with the California Citrus Research Board to develop a fruit picker.

The process involves sending a mechanized scanning unit into orchards and orange groves. Equipped with digital-imaging technology, it creates a three-dimensional map displaying the location, ripeness and quality of fruit.

A robotic picker then follows the maps, using its long mechanical arms to carefully pluck the ripe produce.

The California Citrus Research Board and the Washington State Apple Commission, which also hopes to benefit from the technology, have invested a combined $750,000 in development of the system.

A prototype was tested last month in a Central Coast apple orchard, but it is still a few years away 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 its own 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.

As part of the new technology, technicians use a device called a near-infrared spectrometer to measure sugar levels and other chemical content of grape samples from around the vineyard, Wample said.

Data from those analyses 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 mechanical harvester and GPS controller cost about $200,000, with the spectrometer adding at least another $30,000 to the price of the equipment package. The system has been under development for the past four years and is now being tested on vineyards owned by and contracted to Constellation Wines U.S., Wample said.

Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at 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.

Still, some manufacturers are betting that growers won't want to take a chance with their perishable commodities.

Salinas Valley-based Ramsay Highlander is engineering a new lettuce harvesting machine that could ease the need for workers, company chief executive Frank Maconachy said.

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

Engineers are now nearing completion of a model that picks, cleans, cores and packs lettuce and other field greens. It would likely cost between $250,000 and $400,000, Maconachy said.

"Because of the immigration issue, migrant workers are becoming a difficult entity to find," he 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."