California’s $2 billion strawberry industry accounts for 91% of the U.S. crop, but climate change, tightening chemical regulations, and labor struggles are presenting new challenges for the industry and making business tough on farmers. LA Times business reporter Sam Dean wrote about how robots could be a potential cost-cutting solution. Dean joined host Lisa McRee on LA Times Today. 

Dean said that strawberry farmers are facing unprecedented challenges.

“Labor is getting more expensive. Workers now have more rights. Minimum wages are going up,” he explained. “So, [workers] have more power in the fields to demand higher wages. Also, the workforce itself is aging. People don’t really want to work in strawberries because it’s often the worst type of picking labor; they have to lean down to the ground, very difficult. And also, you know, water rights are getting complicated. We’re in a drought. Water is difficult to come by in general.”

One solution to the labor issue is little robots that can pick tabletop strawberries.

“This Colorado Company called Tortuga AgTech is making these robots,” Dean said. “They’re strawberry robots that can, in certain circumstances, pick strawberries. They have machine vision so they can identify red versus unripe strawberries. They have little snippers to pick the strawberries off the plants. And they can operate all day, in all weather conditions, day or night.” 

The robots are specifically designed for tabletop strawberries, which are hydroponically grown on raised beds and require fewer pesticides. Dean talked about the efficiency of the robots’ work compared to a human picker.

“They are as daily productive [as humans] is what the company is saying,” he said. “Both the company and the growers are saying that over the course of the day, [robots] end up picking as many strawberries as a person would in a normal human shift because they can work longer hours. Right now, they’re still a little slower, but their accuracy is at 95%.”

Dean spoke to experts and growers about how they see robots factoring into the industry’s future.

“I talked to a guy, Mark Bolda, who’s at the UC’s Santa Cruz County Cooperative Extension, and he was saying he’s pretty skeptical of this whole thing,” Dean said. “He’s saying right now, we grow strawberries in the field. It’s already very expensive, $90,000 an acre per year, to produce strawberries. So, the margins aren’t necessarily so fat back here in the first place. But the growers I spoke to at Red Dog in Santa Maria were saying that this is worth it. With the pesticide regime changing, we’re going to have to do this, anyway. And if the robots are picking them, you don’t need to find a labor force.”

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