The take home message from this year’s Fruit Growers Victoria conference was all about designing orchards to embrace the ever-increasing advances in technology.
About 200 fruit industry representatives, researchers and growers made the most of the 16 guest speakers at the McIntosh Centre in Shepparton on Thursday, August 22.
Aerobotics business development manager Benjamin Sharpe spoke about using AI and computer vision to improve the economics of fruit sizing and profitability per hectare, and showed how remote sensing images can be used to determine physiological characteristics of individual trees.
Other speakers included Francesco Brancato, who showed how tech innovation company UNITEC had developed automation for the packing shed; Irrigation Agtech specialist Brett Orwin discussed a new scheduling software to make irrigation more efficient; and agronomist-turned-meteorologist Dale Gray gave an update on climate drivers which may result in a ‘possible’ late-forming La Niña this year.
Delegates saw demonstrations of both tractor-driven and fully autonomous orchard sprayers, as well as spraying drones and a range of industry displays.
Keynote speaker Professor Greg Lang from Michigan State University stressed the importance of embracing technological advances in order to reduce labour costs.
Prof Lang said the biggest ‘crisis’ in the past 10 years had been a more than 60 per cent increase in part-time workers’ wages.
“Orchardists need to develop technology-ready orchards to sustain efficiency and profitability for the next 25 years,” he said.
“This means designing compact orchards.”
Prof Lang said orchards had become 31 per cent more productive in the past 25 years, and attributed that increase to the development of vigour-controlling rootstock and narrower orchard rows.
“But to be competitive in 2034 — and in 2044 — we must create a planar fruiting wall.
“The take home message is the importance of training fruit trees into shapes to produce ‘solar-optimised’ tree rows.”