Fruit Loops-By tapping into the secret lives of cherries and apples, Washington growers are finding how sweet it is.

Ever since the pioneers at the turn of the 19th century marveled at the rare quality of fruit trees they planted along the stream banks of the Columbia basin, in what would become the state of Washington, orchard growers have thrived without the benefit of feedback technology.

Edward Clendaniel Forbes

The rich lava-ash soil, plentiful sunshine, and abundant cool mountain water that flows through the Yakima, Columbia, and Wenatchee River valleys created a billion-dollar industry, sustaining generations of farming families and communities throughout the region.

But on this warm, clear afternoon, with majestic Mount Rainier looming in the background and bins of cherries handpicked hours earlier stacked high around him, grower David Allan’s focus is on a new machine with a sensor about the size of the pit of a prized Bing.

Allan, a third-generation grower and the vice president of orchard operations at Allan Bros. of Naches, Washington, randomly picks some deep-red samples from one of the bins and feeds them gently onto a slowly spinning tray. The machine, which monitors the size and firmness of cherries, allows Allan to tell growers and his sales staff instantaneously, via the Internet, the quality of the harvest. And it symbolizes a bold vision for the future of American agriculture.

Allan and an increasing number of farmers across the U.S. are betting the future of their industry on the blossoming field of "precision agriculture," the digital face of farming.

"Precision agriculture is still very much in its infancy, but almost all of the most successful farmers are beginning to use it in some form," says Pierre Robert, the director of the University of Minnesota Precision Agriculture Center and the man considered the father of the science.

Precision agriculture uses sensors, sophisticated mapping software, handheld GPS systems, and a variety of other tools to streamline the farming process and reduce costs. For the first time in the 10,000-year history of agriculture, farmers are beginning to treat individual square yards of soil as unique, to target individual plants, and to grow more productive and more environmentally friendly crops with digital technology.

The marriage of agriculture and high tech couldn’t be happening at a more critical time for Allan and fellow Pacific Northwest growers. The tree fruit industry–not to mention all of American agriculture–is under global assault. Growers from China, New Zealand, Chile, Italy, Turkey, and Mexico are making rapid inroads in market share. China, which ten years ago produced only 10% of the world’s apples, is now the leading apple producer in the world, harvesting 1.1 billion boxes in 2001. As a result, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that America’s apple growers have lost about $1.5 billion over the past five years, including $500 million last year.

Washington apples are generally considered of higher quality than their foreign competitors. But a strong dollar, hiking the costs of bringing U.S. apples to foreign markets, and American farmers’ high production costs are driving the crisis. China pays its pickers less than a dollar an hour, while Washington state has the highest minimum wage ($6.90) in the U.S., according to Michael Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League.
"As soon as I saw those numbers, I knew the only answer was technology," says grower Charlie de La Chapelle of 7C Orchards in Yakima.

De La Chapelle and Allan are on the steering group of a coalition of researchers, growers, and packers. Their goal: to reduce by 30% the production cost of the Pacific Northwest’s highest-quality fruit by 2010. The joint venture between the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission and Washington State University’s Center for Precision Agricultural Systems marks one of the first concerted efforts by the tree fruit industry to utilize precision agriculture.

"We’re pretty much a low tech operation right now. We see the high tech stuff and drool," says de La Chapelle.

The group’s goals include mechanizing harvest operations, developing sensors that sense tree health and fruit quality, and implementing technologies to streamline the packing process. But growers, packers, and shippers face myriad obstacles, including the fact that many of the necessary technologies are in the developmental stage.

"Sensor technology still has a long way to go," says Dana Faubion, an agriculture specialist at Washington State University. "I’ve yet to find a sensor that can accurately detect the amount of moisture in soil."

Developing cost-effective, accurate sensors has been a stumbling block for precision agriculture since its inception in the early 1980s. "If you drop a soil-moisture sensor too close to a tree root, you’ll get a completely different reading than you will if you drop it less than a foot away," says Allan. De La Chapelle argues that systems for measuring soil moisture from companies such as M.K. Hansen of East Wenatchee, Washington, are much more reliable and cheaper. The price of soil-moisture data loggers has dropped from $1,000 to $300. Jim McFerson, manager of the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission, points out that the vast majority of fruit growers are still using costly and wasteful blanket applications of water, fertilizers, and pesticides in their orchards. Chemical runoff from crops remains a hot-button topic for environmentalists and growers nationwide. And, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, irrigation accounts for between 80% and 90% of all water use in the Western states, a pressing issue in a region hoping to restore its wild salmon runs.

De La Chapelle uses a system permitting him to monitor six blocks of soil on his 300-acre orchard. "Right now we get a reading from the computer screen and make a guess at what we need to apply," he says. "In a couple of years I think we’ll have a system in place that will eliminate the guesswork. We’ll be able to use feedback loops that will allow the machines to continuously apply the precise amounts needed to maximize production."

McFerson believes that the future success of the Pacific Northwest tree fruit industry will require a combination of technological innovations, ranging from powerful sensors to more mechanical solutions.

Fifty miles south of de La Chapelle’s and Allan’s operations, at the foot of the Horse Heaven Hills alongside the spectacular Columbia River gorge, McFerson hops out of his green minivan on an unusually windless day to see a demonstration of Don Peterson’s newest invention, a device that could ultimately cut growers’ labor costs by more than half.

Peterson represents a rare breed. Working out of the Appalachian Fruit Research Station in Kearneysville, West Virginia, Peterson is the only USDA engineer today working on fruit-harvest mechanization.

A 30-year veteran in his field, he hopes to help the USDA and the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission bring to market a cherry and an apple harvester before he retires. Mechanical harvesters for oranges are in limited use in Florida. But the delicate nature of cherries and apples creates a knottier problem.

So Peterson has arrived at a creative solution. With the enthusiasm of a young boy showing off his new bicycle, he fires up a low-slung, three-wheeled vehicle and guides it carefully between the 15-foot-wide orchard rows of grower and packer Bob Harris, who is growing stemless cherries. Peterson steers the machine into position next to a 10-foot-tall tree laden with Bings. After stopping, he maneuvers two joysticks. An 8-foot-long arm, carefully positioned directly under the first major branch of the tree, moves into action.

The arm thrusts the branch toward the center of the tree. Seconds later it snaps the branch back toward the ground. Cherries begin tumbling softly down on a foam-rubber conveyer belt that stretches nearly 5 feet in either direction from the trunk of the tree and conveys the cherries to bins behind the operator. The genius of the arm lies in its ability to be strong enough to make all of the cherries fall from the tree but delicate enough not to harm the branches or whip the cherries so far that they are damaged or fly past the conveyor belt.

Peterson and technician Scott Wolford easily fill two bins with more than 300 pounds of cherries every 15 minutes. They estimate that two operators, after only a few hours of training, could pick 64 bins in an eight-hour day, the equivalent of 32 experienced pickers. Growers currently pay 16 cents a pound to pick their crop. "We can do it for 5 cents a pound, and that’s being very conservative. And we could do it around the clock," says Peterson.

The technology to bring an apple harvester to market is close behind. "Unlike cherries, apples are multiple-pick, meaning they don’t all ripen at the same time. But we think we can overcome that obstacle in the next two or three years," adds Peterson.

One technology that is already in operation and helping to distinguish the quality of the Northwest fruits from those of foreign competitors resides in the Valley Fruit Warehouse in Wapato, Washington. Valley Fruit last year installed sensor technology that allows the sweetness of apples to be determined during the packing process.

"It’s helped me learn a lot about how much good product and bad product there is out there," says Peter Verbrugge, Valley Fruit partner and general manager.

The technology also played a role in Verbrugge’s decision to develop a two-year plan aimed at working the market for premium apples. Using a spectrometer designed by Taste Technologies of New Zealand, Verbrugge is able to measure the sugar content of each apple he packs. Working with a midwestern supermarket chain, he packed only the sweetest 20% of the crop. They then shared information up and down the supply chain and worked on a strategy to promote the apples as the best of the best in an effort to maximize consumer interest. ms are a high-margin product for retail grocers in a low-profit-margin business. The sales jump is of particular interest because the tree fruit industry has been looking for ways to raise Americans’ per-capita consumption of apples from the 20 pounds per year they now eat to that of their European counterparts, who annually consume more than double that amount.

"The success of precision agriculture in the farming community is mostly a matter of attitude," says Robert of the University of Minnesota. "The average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 55, and many of those farmers aren’t willing to change their ways. But those who are represent the wave of the future."

Back in Yakima, around a table at the Apple Tree Restaurant, Allan, de La Chapelle, McFerson, and three other members of the tree fruit industry are discussing the prospects of this year’s apple harvest.

They talk about the quality of the crop, share information about which techniques various growers around the valley are trying, debate which apples are the tastiest, and discuss at length which apples are likely to be the most successful in the years to come. But above all else–even more than ruminating on the whims of Mother Nature–on this evening they are focused on their hopes of using technology to gain an edge over foreign competition.

As he gets up to leave the table, de La Chapelle sums up their aspirations in one final thought: "With a little help from the high tech industry, we think we can ride Moore’s Law into the sunset."

http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/037.html