New robot solution for farmers hit by Brexit fruit picker shortage | SWNS

British farmers have been presented with a solution to beat the shortage of fruit pickers post-Brexit - hiring a robot.

The machine, developed by Dogtooth Technologies, is said to be able to harvest to 200kg strawberries a day - and it doesn't need a visa or a toilet break.

Even before Brexit, farmers had been complaining that they were finding it increasingly hard to recruit labour to pick their summer harvests.

And last week a party of growers - including wine producers - attended a demonstration of robotic fruit picking organised by Produced In Kent to learn how the robots might help them in future.

Founder and CEO of Dogtooth Technologies, Dr Duncan Robertson, said: ”Go back a few hundred years, before the Agricultural Revolution, and farming used to employ about one person for every hectare.

"Now across the farming sector, the average is one person for every 100 hectares - except in horticulture, where it remains stubbornly at one per hectare, the same as in the 17th century.

“For us at Dogtooth, this is both a challenge and an opportunity.

“Everyone has seen the headlines about farms struggling to recruit enough labour, to recruit sufficiently skilled labour, and to retain the labour that they trained in previous years.

“Also the cost of employing labour has gone up because of the visa changes and the like.

“It is inevitable that in future robotic automation will help to address this problem in the same way that other forms of automation - the combine harvester for example - have done in the past.

“Our aim is to provide a complete substitute for human picking.”

But Dr Robertson, who did his PhD in computer vision, insists this does not mean robots are doing people out of jobs.

He said: “Young people are just not willing to do the job any more.”

“In Europe people can get better paid jobs in air-conditioned offices, sitting down all day. Farming is struggling to compete.

“We used to recruit fruit-pickers from Poland, then it was Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia.

“Now we can’t recruit fruit-pickers from Europe and have to go much farther afield - to Uzbekistan and Uganda.

“We aren’t displacing jobs. We are replacing people who have already left the work-force!”

The robots work in teams moving autonomously along the crop rows, making a strange whirring noise as they grow.

Each robot has two picking arms and two “eyes” that allow it to see the colour of the fruit - and judge whether the berry is ripe for picking.

The robot picks the berry by the stalk, lowers into an onboard monitoring system that can instantly check whether it is free from disease or insect damage, and then places it straight into a punnet, sorted according to size.

Each team of about 10 robots has a human supervisor. If the robot has any malfunction it sends a message to the supervisor’s computer tablet, and he or she can quickly respond.

The robot also automatically tells the supervisor when all the punnets are full and need replacing.

Dr Robertson explained that there were many reasons why robotic picking was attractive to growers - in addition to filling the labour gap.

Because the robots scan all the fruit as they pass along the rows - ripe and unripe - they can accurately predict future yields.

Farmers typically contract with supermarkets to supply fruit in seven to 14 days’ time-but human estimating of crop yield can be out by up to 30 per cent, meaning farmers frequently end up with a surplus.

Dr Robertson said: “Better forecasting helps ensure more crop is sold at a higher profit margin.”

Also because the robots pick by the stalk, there is less bruising of the fruit and a reduced risk of disease transference, meaning the fruit ends up with a longer shelf life.

And because the robots can fill the punnets accurately to the supermarkets’ weight specifications, there is reduced over-filling - which is wastage from the farmer’s point of view, although shoppers might be happy to get a bit extra.

Dr Robertson said: “We can essentially package in situ.

“If a berry is rotten, the robot will pick it because we don’t want to leave that berry in the field as a home for insects to lay eggs - but then it is set aside.

“If one berry with mildew gets into a punnet, it quickly affects the others, we don’t want that.

Dogtooth, based near Cambridge, currently has a fleet of about 70 robots that pick “many tens of tons of fruit each season” both in the UK and in Australia.

Each year, the company has produced a new generation of robots, improving each time.