COVER STORY
Automatic for the People The second year of Western Growers’ Specialty Crop Automation Report reveals an industry on the precipice of dramatic benefits to crops, the environment—and people.
challenges their farm faced throughout the years, whether regulatory, pests or water, and many of those issues were addressed by previous generations with technology and innovation. Growers, innovators and trade organizations (like Western Growers) are actively working on the challenges of today, challenges that future generations will look back on and see the value of these efforts and solutions that they rely on just as growers rely on the ones that came before them. Of the ways to tackle issues like labor shortage, water constraint, climate change and pests, one has a burgeoning presence in the strategy: automation. In 2021, Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology and consultant
Roland Berger acted on the need to compile and report on the actions being made with automation within the agricultural space. The result was the launch of the Global Harvest Automation Initiative (GHAI) in February 2021 with the goal to “drive sustainable and domestic food security by accelerating harvest automation across the fresh produce industry, with the ambition of automating 50 percent of the U.S. harvest within 10 years.” A component of this initiative was the Global Harvest Automation Report (GHAR), which is an annual impact and market traction analysis to keep track of automation solutions in the specialty crop industry. Keeping track of automation solutions in the specialty crop industry is one of the key initiatives of GHAI. After the
By Kara Timmins C hange may be spurred by an individual, but it is driven by the many. Progress is pushed by the cumulative efforts of people coming together, sharing their ideas and combining their actions. The need for adaptation to ever-shifting factors is a constant in agriculture. While the pressures for change of the current generation of growers are vastly different than the ones who came before them, the needed characteristic of finding ways to adapt to those pressures is the same. Many growers have stories handed down from their grandparents or even their great-grandparents about the
Close up of the Stout Smart Cultivator
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JULY | AUGUST 2023
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