FEATURE STORY The Promise of Agtech
By Tim Linden I t was a glorious June morning. D’Arrigo California CEO John D’Arrigo and the company’s tech guy, Andy Holtz, Director of Mechanized Equipment Development, were riding on the front end of a working romaine harvester as it moved through a pristine field of beautiful heads of lettuce. Directly underfoot were a number of cameras feeding images of the romaine crop into a computer, which was digitizing those photos to find the exact center of each. Within a few seconds, the computer would send a message to one of several robotic arms equipped with a cone-like, stainless steel cylinder and a cutting blade. The robotic arm would situate the cone over the center of the romaine head and clamp down as the blade would cut the head at its butt. The robotic arm would then place the captured head on a conveyor belt that would take it to a companion truck equipped with an automatic bagger that would place three heads in what would become a familiar
romaine heart three pack. In between, there were a handful of farmworkers overseeing the operation at each step offering human touch when needed. On this particular day, the automated process was not perfect as the robotic cones mishandled a head here and there. But a look back at the 80-inch bed that it was traversing revealed that the field was picked sufficiently clean to warrant the excitement exhibited by the two D’Arrigo
executives. Holtz later reported that the missed head or two were the result of a loose bolt. “Big problems often have simple solutions,” he wrote in an email, attaching a video taken the next day of the harvester operating without a glitch.“The video shows the performance of the robots after finding the one critical bolt that had loosened up. It just so happened to be attached to our steering sensor! Once tightened up, we pressed a few buttons for
D’Arrigo California CEO John D’Arrigo and Andy Holtz, Director of Mechanized Equipment Development
Romaine harvester as it moved through a pristine field of lettuce.
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JULY | AUGUST 2022
Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com
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