"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?
mcguirep 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
asdff 4 hours ago [-]
People grow it all over socal but it has the weather for it.
What's crazy is that it only does the easy stuff (planting and watering). What we need is a robot to do the hard stuff (in my home-gamer opinion: pest control and weeding; maybe picking is most relevant for commercial agriculture).
dekhn 9 hours ago [-]
I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this, because they are duplicating existing things (ag companies already do this), making hardware that would never survive the field (ag companies already solved this), and obscenely expensive (ag companies come up with better cheaper solutions).
asdff 4 hours ago [-]
It might not survive the field but seems fine for greenhouse setting. And a great way to line up a good computer vision engineering job with an ag firm after.
MisterTea 5 hours ago [-]
> making hardware that would never survive the field
What I saw in the article was a prototype and see no reason for it to be "field ready."
9rx 9 hours ago [-]
> I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this
Do they? Academia is about the individual. It is not about others. Sometimes what an academic comes up with ends up being applicable to a larger audience, but that's not the goal. Industry is where people try to do things for others.
esafak 8 hours ago [-]
This is the Engineering- not Literature department. People expect it to be useful.
dekhn 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, if you're an academic and you don't care if anybody uses your technology, that's fine, I guess, but the folks publishing these papers want the industry to use their ideas: "In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots." is the very first sentence.
9rx 8 hours ago [-]
That's a product of coming up through a school system that emphasizes writing engaging content to please teachers. "Oh no, the farmers can't find help" sounds alarming and draws you in. But as you point out, it ends there. Beyond that, the academic goes off and does whatever is interesting to him personally without concern for what anyone else might actually need. And fair enough. He'd be working in industry if he were trying to please others.
And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage". Quite the opposite. I can't find enough farm work to do! I could easily grow my operation tenfold without breaking a sweat. But there are so many other farmers who want that work as well. It is hard to compete.
averageRoyalty 6 hours ago [-]
> And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage".
Are you a Japanese farmer? The context of the paper was Japanese, and there is absolutely a labour shortage. Your section of the world is a timy percentage, and whilst I'm glad you don't have a shortage, your experience is not the worlds.
9rx 5 hours ago [-]
> Your section of the world is a timy percentage
That's fair, but the same thing is said here too. It's a common trope that gets repeated because it sounds catchy, not because it is true.
> and there is absolutely a labour shortage.
Is there? Everything I can find suggests that Japan is no different than here: That farmers want to do more, but struggle to grow their operations under to the intense competition of every other farmer wanting to do the same.
What you find here, and seemingly also in Japan, is some farms that have gotten too big for their britches that cry "labor shortage" instead of "you know, maybe I should downsize and let someone else have a turn". That's not a labor shortage. If you can bleed them dry selling them your technology, good on ya! You absolutely should. But there is no need to worry about them. Letting them fail solves the problem just the same.
But if what you say is true, please point me to where I can find all this unutilized farmland that cannot be managed because there isn't anyone to do it. I am quite interested in becoming the one to take it over. I may not be a Japanese farmer today, but life is not static.
dekhn 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, many of us in academia (I was previously) have made things for industry only to learn that we ignored something important and obvious that was already known. I wish I could find the nice article that gave a bunch of examples of papers and concluded "John Deere already sells this product and it's being used at scale today; if you want to do better, at least be aware of what's going on in the field"
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
Here's the video "Fanuc already sells this product and it's being used at scale today."[1] This works in a very orderly greenhouse, one of the largest in Europe.
I'll grant you that people who don't understand the difference between academia and industry might mistakenly push themselves towards academia when they really want to be in industry, but we shouldn't take that as an understanding that academia and industry serve the same function. They have different names exactly because they are expected to be different. Academia is where one goes to explore oneself in pursuit of one's interests. Industry is where one goes to explore others in pursuit of serving their needs.
dekhn 7 hours ago [-]
I disagree.
For example, I work for a company called Genentech that was founded by an academic. They discovered something important (how to clone genes) and shortly after, found medical applications (human growth hormone and insulin) that transformed treatment,
We carry out open-ended research on human biology, have many visitors from academia, along with dual appointments (person is both a professor and a scientist at the company), publish in the same journals as academics, etc...
And this is highly incentivized by the government: Bayh-Dole act makes universities want to patent tech that gets licensed by industry.
9rx 6 hours ago [-]
Where do you disagree? You point out that individuals are not statues and can shift between spending time in industry and in academia. You also point out that industry and academia are not confined by who owns the building that the people are occupying. But nobody was ever thinking that wasn't the case.
This is the first time anyone has even considered that someone could be forever stuck an academic or industry operative, or that industry can't take place in universities and academics in private businesses. Good on you for coming up with hypothetical alternatives suitable for a sci-fi thriller. You've clearly got a creative mind! But since they are only hypothetical, it is not clear what purpose they serve here or how it even could begin to relate to anything being discussed.
zipy124 6 hours ago [-]
That sentence is because in engineering journals you often need to state some problem you are solving. Proving the problem exists isn't necessary, just enough to convince the editor. Most academics don't care if someone uses the technology, just like most software engineers don't care about the user of their product.
dekhn 6 hours ago [-]
Yes it's the same reason in grad school they taught us to write grant proposals that cure diseases of senators and congresspeople, while actually working on fundamental research problems that have no direct applicability.
asdff 4 hours ago [-]
Every single STEM paper there is will have sentences like that putting the work into context and perspective.
ramy_d 8 hours ago [-]
I'm looking at something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Dc6QNWiIs and I feel like they are doing totally different things. Both harvest tomatoes, but these are totally different approaches.
ruslan 8 hours ago [-]
Did you see tamatoes harvested that way ? They are suitable only for producing sauce.
reachableceo 9 hours ago [-]
Really? Can you link to those solutions please ?
ge96 4 hours ago [-]
I'm wanting to do this for dead leaves/pruning
Or if it makes more sense to just let them fall, identify and pick up the leaves from the floor/plant pot
tguvot 4 hours ago [-]
fruit picking robot (trees, tomatoes, berries) few years ago
> In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots.
This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized.
So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue.
I agree about immigration, but the world has a large amount of very fertile land in places with very high costs of living. Bringing in large numbers of new immigrants at ultra low pay will have big consequences in most high-cost countries. It's worked well in the US, but that's because of our (former) identity as a nation of immigrants and the massive overlap between US and Latin American culture. In other nations, the outcome could very well be a racially/culturally incompatible underclass working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.
zzzeek 2 hours ago [-]
but Japan is actually relaxing immigration rules due to the need for younger workers. I bet they can pay them pretty well for less than the R&D, maintenance, and loss of productivity of the robots costs
Rendered at 02:43:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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?
> 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinate_cultivar
See below for a couple examples:
https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-...
https://tta-iso.com/innovations/harvai
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.
If you like interesting fruit, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/
for many fruits you will have never seen before.
What I saw in the article was a prototype and see no reason for it to be "field ready."
Do they? Academia is about the individual. It is not about others. Sometimes what an academic comes up with ends up being applicable to a larger audience, but that's not the goal. Industry is where people try to do things for others.
And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage". Quite the opposite. I can't find enough farm work to do! I could easily grow my operation tenfold without breaking a sweat. But there are so many other farmers who want that work as well. It is hard to compete.
Are you a Japanese farmer? The context of the paper was Japanese, and there is absolutely a labour shortage. Your section of the world is a timy percentage, and whilst I'm glad you don't have a shortage, your experience is not the worlds.
That's fair, but the same thing is said here too. It's a common trope that gets repeated because it sounds catchy, not because it is true.
> and there is absolutely a labour shortage.
Is there? Everything I can find suggests that Japan is no different than here: That farmers want to do more, but struggle to grow their operations under to the intense competition of every other farmer wanting to do the same.
What you find here, and seemingly also in Japan, is some farms that have gotten too big for their britches that cry "labor shortage" instead of "you know, maybe I should downsize and let someone else have a turn". That's not a labor shortage. If you can bleed them dry selling them your technology, good on ya! You absolutely should. But there is no need to worry about them. Letting them fail solves the problem just the same.
But if what you say is true, please point me to where I can find all this unutilized farmland that cannot be managed because there isn't anyone to do it. I am quite interested in becoming the one to take it over. I may not be a Japanese farmer today, but life is not static.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nOdiwKDXYM
For example, I work for a company called Genentech that was founded by an academic. They discovered something important (how to clone genes) and shortly after, found medical applications (human growth hormone and insulin) that transformed treatment,
We carry out open-ended research on human biology, have many visitors from academia, along with dual appointments (person is both a professor and a scientist at the company), publish in the same journals as academics, etc...
And this is highly incentivized by the government: Bayh-Dole act makes universities want to patent tech that gets licensed by industry.
This is the first time anyone has even considered that someone could be forever stuck an academic or industry operative, or that industry can't take place in universities and academics in private businesses. Good on you for coming up with hypothetical alternatives suitable for a sci-fi thriller. You've clearly got a creative mind! But since they are only hypothetical, it is not clear what purpose they serve here or how it even could begin to relate to anything being discussed.
Or if it makes more sense to just let them fall, identify and pick up the leaves from the floor/plant pot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxF3Ok6Uf64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnyfX4LcAfU
This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized.
So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue.
[1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...