This story originally aired on “Marketplace Tech” on May 20. Listen to Marketplace each weekday morning at 4:45 am on KVPR.
California is known for being home to Hollywood and, of course, the center of global tech, Silicon Valley. But the Golden State also has millions of acres of farmland, and we’re exploring how technology is changing that landscape in a series this week about “Agtech Valley.”
The Central Valley region is known as the “food basket of America” because it produces the majority of fruits, nuts and vegetables in the country. Everything from almonds and broccoli to peaches, nectarines and plums, which is what they grow at HMC Farms in the Fresno area.
We visited HMC Farms with its farm manager Drew Ketelsen, who took us to an orchard of Lady Erin yellow peach trees trained to grow in narrow upright pillars rather than the usual rounded shape. “The reason we do that is to get better sunlight in these trees,” he said. “We do this for labor efficiency and for the oncoming technology that we're hoping to develop.”
Ketelson is a bit of an agriculture tech nerd, explaining that “you need to be innovative not only for efficiency and cost, but for sustainability.”
He’s currently testing a system of semi-automated platforms on wheels that navigate through the orchard rows to help with thinning fruit early in the season and picking it for harvest, a job that would usually be done by workers on foot and on ladders.
“We have 36 of these platforms,” he said. The platforms there had workers harnessed onto them while working. “The hardest part for technology is to see the fruit. It's hidden behind leaves, it's on the other side of a limb, it's on the top of the limb, the back of the limb, the side. And so people are so good at what they do, and so we're just trying to make these jobs easier and better for them, so they can keep completing their tasks that they're really good at.”
Ketelson doesn’t see new technology as replacing human farm workers, but rather as “it’s creating new jobs that are better paying, and really interesting,” he said. “So, I’m thinking that this new technology is going to bring this next generation in, and they don’t have to do what their dad or their grandpa did. They can come out and start a new thing and revolutionize agriculture.”
Even some pretty futuristic stuff, like: “We’ve been working on drone harvest, which are drones flying, attached to one of our platforms here, harvesting fruit off the tree. We have non-invasive sensors where we bring it out here and it’s going to help us predict our harvest timing, because harvest timing … it’s very specific, it’s to the day. Not a day too early, not a day too late,” he explained.
From the orchard we visited Ketelsen’s fabrication shop. “It's nothing fancy,” he said, “but it really helps us shape and tool things to adapt these new technologies.”
He shows me an old tractor they’ve outfitted with new cameras that collect field data to feed machine-learning algorithms. It looks like a Wall-E, or even like Johnny Five, the robot from the movie “Short Circuit.” “We have two Johnny Fives on each side of the tractor,” Ketelsen said, describing the cameras. “And what they do is … it takes pictures of the fruit on both sides of the row.”
Agriculture is an unpredictable business, so using technology like artificial intelligence can help farmers to plan not just for the next season, but for an uncertain future for the whole industry, which is facing climate change and labor challenges.
“We are really trying to build infrastructure, the tools, the partnerships needed to advance agriculture, and global agtech and food production,” said Priscilla Koepke, CEO of the nonprofit F3, or Farms Food Future. With a federal grant of $65 million from the 2021 American Rescue Plan, it’s pushing to make California’s Central Valley a hub for innovation, like Silicon Valley just a few hours away.
“I think we’re only just at a point now of having even more fuel to keep going, and to do it at another scale, truly,” she added.
And it's essential that the industry embrace the shift, said Ketelsen, who’s a board member of F3. “I think without ag technology, we won't be able to provide a product to our customers at a reasonable cost. It's not just about replacing jobs. It's about making jobs better, and it's about allowing us to keep these jobs that have a lot of labor needs in business,” he said.
We'll have more on how farmworkers fit into this innovative future as our series on California’s Agtech Valley continues.