Dr. Matthew Whiting describes several years of studies on sweet cherry harvest efficiency.
Link to YouTube video: 2) Whiting HE
Text Transcript and Description of Visuals
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| I’m Matthew Whiting and I’m happy to welcome you to this fourth in the Washington State University, Oregon State University tree fruit extension webinar series. On behalf of my co-organizers, Ashley Thompson, who’s a tree fruit extension agent with Oregon State University, and Bernardita Sallato, who’s tree fruit extension specialist with Washington State University. | Title slide. Video title: “WSU-OSU Tree Fruit Extension Webinar Series”. Host information: “Ashley Thompson, OSU”, “Matthew Whiting, WSU” and “Bernardita Sallato, WSU”. |
| I’m going to give you an update on some of the work that we’ve done looking at sweet cherry harvest efficiency over the years and looking at various technologies and various systems with the simple goal of trying to better understand the factors that influence harvest efficiency. Knowing full well the importance of harvest labor and this crew that you see in the title slide here on production budgets for cherry growers. | Title slide. Presentation title: “Sweet cherry harvest efficiency trials”. Presenter information “Matthew Whiting, Washington State University”. |
| So there are many factors that intuitively will influence harvest efficiency. They may include canopy architecture, the training system that you’re using, the yield of the fruit in that particular year, the quality and certainly the condition of the fruit, whether or not any sorting needs to be done in the field. environmental conditions will influence. We’ve also seen that simply the means of reimbursement or how much you’re paying people or even the way that you’re paying people by a piece rate or hourly clearly will influence the speed with which the fruit are removed and including the rate of pay. | Slide titled “Factors affecting harvest efficiency:” contains a bullet point list of factors, as outlined in the audio. |
| I’ve got a couple final ones here that I include in bold and larger font and that’s the picker. And then the presence or absence of stems. And I’ll show you some data to support the importance of those factors as well. And we’ll look at also at canopy architecture and very briefly look at their role that fruit yield or orchard yield plays on harvest efficiency too. | Two new bullet points appear with large, bold text: Picker and Presence/absence of stems. |
| So we recognize that cherries in Washington state and around the world are grown in very different canopy structures. And so from the top left, a traditional old Bing Rainier orchard, top right, more of a modern Spanish bush KGB structure. Bottom left is a more of a steep leader system. And then in the middle, you see in the bottom, a UFO vertical wall, and then a Vogel central leader on the right. And so we had this question about what difference do those systems make on how fast and how efficient the harvest process is. | Slide titled “Canopy architecture: what difference does it make?” contains 5 images of cherry orchards with different architecture types. |
| We addressed this a few years ago now, but we took the same pickers, the same four people who were commercial cherry pickers, and we brought them through actually 13 different commercial orchards in Washington state. And I’m just sharing with you five of those. The traditional open center, the average harvest speed was about one pound per minute or half a kilo per minute. | Slide titled “Harvest efficiency (lbs./min) contains a bar graph of the pounds of cherries that can be picked per minute in five different tree architecture types. |
| When the same people were picking in a steep leader, they were about 13% faster. They were picking about 1.16 pounds per minute. As the crew moved into a century leader orchard, there was a significant jump in efficiency about 45% faster than the traditional open center system. When they moved into a KGB that was nearly pedestrian, there was another increase again, about 55% faster than the traditional one. And when they moved into a vertical wall UFO block, which was not pedestrian either, there was more than a doubling in the speed compared to the traditional open center. | Arrows appear between the bars labelled with the percentage that the picking speed increased between tree architecture types. |
| So we also took this system a few years ago down to Chile. We did not take the same pickers down to Chile, by the way. So these are some data from a tunnel system in Chile using pickers from Chile. Just to give you some data, I know that there are several of you from Chile joining today. And here’s where those pickers ranked in terms of efficiency in that tunnel system. Close to the steep leader is how it worked out. | An additional bar appears on the graph labeled “Chile Tunnel”. This bar sits between the traditional open center and the steep leader architectures on the graph. |
| But what’s really interesting is if you compare the old system versus, let’s just call it a new system, in particular, a system that’s planar and simplified in its structure like the UFO, we were twice as fast. And so with the same acreage or same land base in an orchard, clearly you would require only half the pickers to remove the fruit in the same amount of time, or with the same number of pickers, you could pick the fruit and clear it out twice as fast. | An arrow appears beside the UFO bar with text highlighting that the acreage was the same as the traditional architecture orchard, but the picking was twice as fast. |
| We specifically address sort of a more modern system as the steep leader and a new system that’s being adopted around the world as the UFO architecture. | Slide contains a labeled image of an orchard with a steep leader architecture, and a labeled image of an orchard with a UFO architecture. |
| I’ll just share with you those data for those individual four pickers now. This is picking rate in pounds per minute. Blue is the steep leader and green is the UFO. | Slide titled “Harvest efficiency (lbs./min) contains a bar graph of the picking rate of 4 different pickers. This data is shown for both the steep leader and the UFO architecture. |
| And so for each picker, their efficiency was increased by moving into the UFO from a steep leader architecture. Picker three had a very subtle increase of only 15%. Another picker increased by 40%. The most experienced of this picking crew was a 44-year-old woman was 62% faster. But what was particularly interesting was the radical improvement in harvest efficiency for her 17 year old daughter, who didn’t particularly enjoy moving the ladder around in the larger steep leader trees, but was very efficient. | Percentages appear over each bar showing the increase in picking speed for each picker as a percentage. |
| In fact, she became the second most efficient picker. She surpassed these other two in efficiency when you move to these planar systems. And we feel that’s going to be important. You think about the future of harvest and harvester demographics that maybe less experienced people in these orchards can be very efficient picking the fruit. | |
| So here’s a way of looking at the effect of tree yield in terms of harvest efficiency. We’ve often heard that, well, higher yielding blocks will be faster to pick or more efficient to pick. And we address this issue by harvesting trees individually, measuring how fast that occurred and then relating that to the time that it took to pick the tree. And so each of these dots is a single tree harvested and you’re seeing the rate in pounds per minute. From a range of about two and a half tons per acre at the low side, to three times that or nearly nine tons per acre on the far side. And what you can see is there’s a flat line, really no influence of yield on picking efficiency for that picker. | Slide titled “Harvest efficiency (lbs./min) contains a scatterplot of the picking rate in pounds per minute versus the tree yield in pounds. The trend line is nearly horizontal. |
| There’s similar data from a different person picking in that same orchard. So there’s the natural variability in individual tree yield, which is expressed here and which didn’t seem to influence harvest efficiency. | Additional points appear on the graph in green. The trend line is nearly horizontal. |
| We also had this question about the effects of with or without stems and when picking cherries by hand. And so we’ve looked at tree yield here for seven different trees and the picking rate with stems on. And again, you see a fairly flat line. | Slide titled “Harvest efficiency studies: Effect of yield and stems” contains a scatterplot of the picking rate of stem-on cherries versus the tree yield in pounds. The trend line is nearly horizontal |
| Big increase here was when we asked people in this same orchard to pick the cherries without the stems. In other words, leaving the pedestal on the tree. And that led to an immediate 70% increase in harvest efficiency by picking fruit stem-free. | Additional points appear on the graph showing the picking rate of stem-free cherries versus the tree yield in pounds. These points show an increase in picking rate versus the stem-on cherries. |
| We’ve looked at the stem-free issue because in the longer term, we’re pursuing new harvest technologies. And that has taken two forms. The first of which is on the left here, a graduate student holding a catching frame. We’ve looked at mechanically assisted shake and catch harvest technologies to work in many different architectures and harvesting stem-free cherries. | Slide titled “New harvest technologies:” contains photos of mechanically-assisted and fully mechanical shake and catch systems, as well as a bullet point list outlining the positives and negatives of the mechanically assisted system. |
| The image on the bottom right is of the fully mechanical cherry harvest. This is clearly a longer term prospect, but one that we have been working on for almost 20 years now. It does require a Y-trellis configuration, but it has the potential for a 50 fold improvement in harvest efficiency. | Additional bullet points appear on the slide outlining the positives and negatives of the fully mechanical system. |
| So we’ve been looking at various prototypes, and this is one handheld battery operated reciprocating saws with teams that have built new shaker actuators at the end and combine that with various forms of catching frames. | Slide titled “Shake-and-catch prototype:” contains images of the mentioned prototype with it’s component parts labeled. |
| And here’s what it looks like in terms of pounds per minute when we’ve tried those systems in the orchard. Here’s our traditional cherry with a stem, ladders and buckets, hand picking, about one pound per minute. I showed you when we went to stem-free cherries. We increase that by about 70%. When we utilize these prototype shake and catch systems, we increase individual picker performance to more than six pounds per minute. So that’s three to four times our faster speed. | Slide titled “Harvest efficiency studies:” contains a bar graph of harvest efficiency for stem-on, stem-free, and shake-and catch cherries. |
| Now, with the potential for fully mechanical harvest, there’s a radical improvement here, more than a 50 fold increase in harvest rate efficiencies. So it does beg the question about labor supply problems, which we’ve heard about for more than a decade here in the Pacific Northwest. And I would suggest to you that as we improve canopy architectures and training systems, and we look to novel harvest technologies, that we can reduce the concerns over these labor supply issues. | Slide titled “Harvest efficiency studies: Labor supply problems?” contains a bar graph of harvest efficiency for stem-on, stem-free, shake-and-catch, and mechanically harvested cherries. |
| And in the interim, innovative growers are planting upright fruiting offshoot architectures to a vertical or a V system or a tatura system, and they’re adopting platforms and other means for making the process more efficient. | Slide titled “6 year old ‘Early Robin’/Gisela 12’ Y-trellised UFO” contains an image of a UFO style orchard. |
| So with that, I’ll wrap up this short presentation on harvest efficiency. This is our Facebook site, WSU Stone Fruit Physiology, and my email is there. | Slide contains the email and the Facebook page of the presenter. |
