In Northern California's olive growing regions I've been noticing a trend towards tearing out old olive trees and replacing them with trees that are grown on trellises in the same fashion as grapes. This appears to be done to utilize the picking robots that were specialized for vineyards. It's interesting to think that pruning practices like espalier, coppicing and hedging could be brought back to utilize robotics efficiently for any number of fruiting trees and bushes.
Kinda wish we got rid of timber fences and just put up hedges of fruit trees all in between houses, with roaming robots to tend to their production.
The video displays exactly what I'm talking about though. The machinery is build around olive trees grown as hedges instead of the traditional tree shapes that requires shaking or ladders.
Olives as trees don't require wires to grow on like grape vines, sorry if that was what you thought I was implying.
Here in Spain we observe the same. Having dozens of harvesting olives manually or with the help of small machines were worthwhile while big olive harvesters were rare and salaries where lower, but now we have the opposite situation.
Is that really a trend? Because olive trees take decades to grow and at least 3 years to bear so I have a hard time believing they’re being ripped out and restarted.
I believe some of this is due to changes in what types of olives were considered desirable. I'm not an expert, but some of the green stuffing olives have been replaced with different varieties. Also there are pests and diseases that are taking over, so newer resistant varieties are valuable replacements.
Three years is also not a terrible time period compared to other nut trees that are grown in the area, specially if harvesting can be improved to be less manual. Some of the trees that are being replaced are 80-100 years old, so the wood can be a valuable resource that will cover the costs.
It looks like autonomous robots are on everyone's lips lately, that's awesome, because it's really interesting topic (at least for me).
What would you suggest reading to create my first robot? I mean the hardware part, not the programming one. Thank you
The old TAB books on robotics are pretty good IMO. Not the electronics section, that's mostly out of date, but all the physical stuff like motors and kinetics is still pretty topical.
The hard part about robotics is that you're interfacing with the real world, where everything can go wrong. It's like you take a program and run it on a CPU with a radiation source next to it. All your strong invariants suddenly become a "maybe". Not literally of course, but that's how it feels if you start your robot for the 100th time thinking nothing can go wrong this time ...
There is low hanging fruit in this specific application for Agbots.
The way wine grapes are grown, carefully trained and groomed to grow in a line, a specific shape and orientation, almost like an entire field of carefully shaped bonsai trees. Once it's established, a vineyard doesn't change much year to year. It's a ideal place to start with agbots and get things right before going to more complicated applications. The labor costs are also high, and highly seasonal as many of these vineyards are in expensive coastal areas like Nor Cal.
The most common type of machine automation in the wine industry is the use of optical sorters - no longer do you need rows of people separating good grapes from raisains and debris. The machine scans what's going through the shoot and uses multiple prongs to flick anything unwanted into a separate container. The sorters are even transportable to different wineries and vineyards.
The issue is that wine is not an engineering product, people don't want it all to taste the same. These machines do have calibration but in my experience we're getting too close to wine as a generic product. That is my fear with something like this - we know more than ever about grapes and when to harvest, we lose what makes a wine unique.
So while I praise this product and the exciting world of agricultural technology - just not sure it's the right direction for wine.
I recently volunteered to help a local vineyard harvest their grapes. It was a learning experience, and I thought about robots and if they'd be suitable. Part of the "skill" involved was leaving grapes on the vine that hadn't ripened 100%. Furthermore, the care required to gently clip and extract the grapes from a "viney" plant without damage or loss was sometimes tricky. Hard to see a robot mastering the process, without changes in how the grapes are grown/attached.
Just another way to replace moderately qualified jobs by some opaque tech. I understand why it happens, but this isn't progress. Making good wine requires dedication and experience from everyone involved, that's not what you'll buy when you get one of these perfectly controlled products. But let's Ikea everything non essential as well... that's good for the wealthy after all.
Kinda wish we got rid of timber fences and just put up hedges of fruit trees all in between houses, with roaming robots to tend to their production.