 August 17, 2018 CapitalPress.com 5 Next steps in automated apple picking By DAN WHEAT Capital Press MOSES LAKE, Wash. — Automated Ag Systems, of Moses Lake, and DBR Con- veyor Concepts, of Conklin, Mich., are field testing a hy- brid system they say will be the best harvest assist for ap- ples short of robotic pickers. The system features DBR vacuum tubes replacing pick- er bags and mounted on Au- tomated Ag’s self-propelled Bandit Express picking plat- form. It will be an affordable tool significantly improving efficiency until and perhaps beyond the advent of com- mercial robotic pickers in five to eight years, the companies’ principals say. The Automated Ag-DBR should be commercially avail- able next fall, said Phil Brown, DBR owner. It should improve picking efficiency by 85 per- cent over ladders and by 40 percent over Bandit Express platforms produced by Auto- mated Ag, said J.J. Dagorret, Automated Ag owner. The apple industry in Washington, Michigan and New York is highly interested in mechanized apple picking to answer an increasing labor shortage. “They phoned me up last winter and asked if I could put their harvester on my platform. I said yes, let’s give it a shot,” Dagorret said. The self-propelled platform portion of DBR’s machine was simply too long, Dagorret said. Courtesy of Automated Ag Systems Field testing of Automated Ag-DBR harvest assist in a Stemilt Growers apple orchard in Mattawa, Wash., on July 31. Vacuum tubes replace picking bags. It never caught on for sales in Washington, the largest apple producing state, Brown said. Four pickers on the Auto- mated Ag platform pick into DBR vacuum tubes strapped to their bodies instead of bags. The tubes and DBR decelera- tion and bin fillers fill bins in four to five minutes versus 10 to 12 minutes with pickers us- ing bags, Dagorret said. “You’re eliminating bag dumping so you’re saving time and bruising fruit less,” he said. “There’s no weight for pickers because they nev- er have to hoist and handle bags. I think it’ll be a game changer.” The Bandit Express picks up empty bins left in rows by tractors in front of it and low- ers filled bins off the back for tractors to haul away. The new system was first tested in a Stemilt Growers’ orchard of Rave, an early man- aged apple variety, in Mattawa on July 31. “It was a little shaky. There were some issues with the bin-filling and electrical stuff. We are adjusting that and will test it in Lodi, Calif., next week,” Dagorret said. The platform pickers pick fruit from about six-feet and upward. Pickers walking on the ground will pick low-hang- Farmland cash rents mixed in region By BRAD CARLSON Capital Press Farmland cash rents have been up this year in Oregon and Washington, and mostly flat in Idaho, the USDA Na- tional Agricultural Statistics Service reported in early Au- gust. Drew Eggers, a farm- er in Meridian, Idaho, said the rents he pays are in line with his state’s averages. He doesn’t expect much change as he starts to arrange leases for next year. “Lately, with commodity prices softening, landlords haven’t felt like they want to raise the rent — unlike six or seven years ago when the commodity prices were stron- ger and farmers had better income off their crops,” he said. “Landlords felt like they ought to share in that and take advantage of increases in the prices of the crops.” Eggers leases ground for three or more years, or for a year with a renewal option. He grows mint, a crop he said is suited to a multi-year lease since it is a perennial that is not planted every year and comes with much of its input cost up front. “Now I run into land that maybe will sell and go out of ag,” he said. “So I also even have buyout clauses in mint leases.” Such buyout or “make-whole” clauses could come into play where a mint crop is somewhere in the mid- dle of a three- to five-year growing cycle, he said. NASS said Idaho crop- land overall this year rented for $160 per acre for the full growing season, unchanged from 2017. Cash rent for irri- gated cropland rose a dollar to $216. Non-irrigated cropland rented for $56 per acre, down $2. Pasture rents dropped by an average of a dollar to $11. Eggers said he does not lease for a “growing season” timeframe, which can come into play for statistical report- ing purposes to reflect leases that expire immediately after harvest. From 2017 to this year, NASS said, Oregon cash rents went from $152 to $159 for all cropland, irrigated crop- land increased by $10 to $215, non-irrigated cropland rose $3 to $93, and pasture rents rose by a dollar to $12. After fall- ing in 2015 and ’16, all-crop- land and irrigated cropland rents in Oregon increased last year and this year. In Washington from 2017 to this year, cash rents went from $198 to $203 for crop- land overall, $350 to $358 for irrigated cropland, and $73 to $75 for non-irrigated cropland, NASS said. A pas- ture rent comparison was not listed. Christopher Mertz, Wash- ington-based NASS director for the Northwest, said that in addition to traditional driv- ers of demand, cash rents can vary from one year to the next based on changes in crop rota- tions, rainfall totals, hay pric- es and other factors. Changes in cash rent can follow changes in farm real estate values but do not al- ways do so, he said. For ex- ample, as Idaho all-cropland rents went unchanged from a year ago, all-cropland real estate values increased by 3.5 percent. All-cropland real estate values from 2017 to 2018 went up by 2.4 percent and 1 percent in Oregon and Wash- ington, respectively. ing fruit into bags and dump them into bins. Automated Ag built and sold about 725 Bandit Express mobile platforms from 2013 through 2017 and is building 65 this year, plus 65 Bandit Cubs which are 17 inches nar- rower than the Bandit Express. The Express sell for $63,000 apiece and Cubs for $68,000. The DBR vacuum sys- tem will sell for $35,000 to $40,000 each and will mount right on the Express or Cub, Dagorret and Brown said. The idea is a functional, dependable product that is af- fordable, they said. Brown said commercial ro- botic harvesters are probably five to six years away and are slowed, as much as anything, by needing trees designed for robotic pruning and picking. Automated Ag also is working with FFRobotics, of Emeq-Heffer, Israel, to field test FFRobotics robotic apple picker this fall in Washington. The DBR bin filler will be used with the robotic picker on a Bandit Express or Bandit Cub platform, Dagorret said. Abundant Robotics, of Hayward, Calif., is the only other major player in robotic apple picking development but its machine is too big to fit well in tree rows, Dagorret said. It only has one picking arm and lacks pass-through bin flow, he said. Dan Steere, Abundant Ro- botics CEO, declined com- ment other than to say field testing of his system contin- ues. At the December 2016 annual meeting of the Wash- ington State Tree Fruit Associ- ation, Steere said his goal was to have a robotic apple picker ready for commercial use by fall of 2018. Karen Lewis, Washington State University Extension tree fruit specialist in Ephrata, said she’s a bit more optimis- tic than Dagorret about robot- ic development. She said she thinks commercialization will be sooner than five to eight years. She said DBR has been part of WSU research and that she’s thrilled to see its vacuum system combined with the successful Automat- ed Ag picking platforms. If it works well, it will tap out human picking efficiency, she said. The only other thing to improve human or eventually robotic picking speed is fur- ther improvement of tree can- opies, she said. It remains to be seen, Lew- is said, whether the Automated Ag-DBR will take off big or whether several technologies converge at the same time. “We are at a cusp and need to all stay on our toes to make sure what comes is appropriate technology that solves prob- lems,” she said. “Not technol- ogy in search of a problem.” A field near Nampa, Idaho, is planted to seed peas. Farmland cash rents have been up this year in Oregon and Washington, and mostly flat in Idaho, the USDA National Agricul- tural Statistics Service reported in early August. 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