—story by Ross Courtney
—photos by TJ Mullinax
The self-driving tractors, smart sprayers and other forms of automation that growers hope will help them overcome the surging cost of labor and protect the future of the tree fruit industry are making their way onto Washington farms.
“Things are accelerating,” said Keith Veselka, managing partner of NWFM, a Central Washington farm management company.
But someone must help growers through the patient and sometimes painful trial-and-error phase of integrating new machines. The tractors may drive themselves, but the commercialization of automation is hardly automatic.
That’s where dealerships come in, said Veselka, a frequent early adopter of automation and a board member of the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission.
“We need that retail partner to understand the space,” Veselka said.
As the era of automation advances, dealerships are helping growers navigate new options and learn to deploy them, while growers are pushing those dealers toward the emerging tools the industry needs.
Burrows Tractor, a Yakima, Washington, equipment dealership, has positioned itself as a pivot point for ushering emerging automation technology into commercial use through a series of conscious decisions and prodding from growers.
“We had a lot of conversations with our growers about what is the next step in farming,” said Tom Riel, sales manager and a member of the family that owns the company.
The company has agreements involving four automation tools — Prospr, the self-driving, diesel hybrid sprayer from Robotics Plus; the self-driving, electric Monarch tractor; Bluewhite’s retrofit and factory kits that automate traditional tractors; and Smart Apply precision, variable sprayers.
Burrows isn’t the only one. RDO Equipment and Papé Machinery represent GUSS automated sprayers on the West Coast. RDO also sells Smart Apply and an automated tank-mixing system. Both dealers demo the equipment at field days and work with early adopters to learn the nuances.
Automation requires a whole new approach to customer service, Riel said. Reps from the dealer and the manufacturer help growers install the equipment, site communication towers, build maps and more. With tractors, growers know how to use them. They just need to make sure the new model fits the orchard and has enough horsepower.
“After the sale, there’s not as much to do,” Riel said.
Burrows’ approach
To kickstart new technology adoption, Burrows finds growers to hold demos and sends its sales and support crews to trainings. Then the company negotiates an agreement with the manufacturer, which usually includes stocking requirements.
Next, Burrows’s staff vets grower customers similarly to the way they do machines: They look for farmers with the patience and will to muscle through inevitable setbacks. High-tech automation isn’t perfect out of the box.
“We tell them it may only work on 70 percent of their land or operation,” Riel said.
Riel declined to share unit prices, which are complicated by lease and buy options, quantity packages, site visits and purchase commitments.
“We don’t want to sell somebody the next thing off the shelf. We want to make sure it’s a long-term match,” said TJ Lange, ag technology manager for Burrows.
They call it a scope-of-work plan, looking five years down the road at what tasks growers want to automate. For example, if growers want systemic change, they have options such as Robotics Plus, Lange said. If they simply want to automate their current fleet of tractors, Burrows will steer them toward a retrofit with Bluewhite’s Pathfinder software that automates existing tractors.
Also, Burrows can now install the Bluewhite Pathfinder kits locally, rather than sending tractors to California — as they initially had to do.
The timing is tough. Growers want automation but can’t afford to gamble on new equipment right now.
Jeff Cleveringa, also a research commission board member and orchard manager for Columbia Fruit Packers, said the adoption rate of new technology should improve once the fruit economy improves. Until then, times are tough for distributors like Burrows, just as it is for growers. All folks in the game need to make money for tech adoption to scale.
“Burrows can’t make a living off of maintaining 10 machines,” he said.
In June, farm equipment manufacturing giant CNH Industrial announced an investment partnership with Bluewhite.
CNH and Bluewhite are taking things slowly, with only a few pilot dealerships on the West Coast, said Paul Welbig, precision technology lead for CNH’s North American division. Burrows is one of them.
“We’re not trying to go too fast, because we’re trying to learn along the way,” he said.
Details are still in the works, but the arrangement will bolster the pipeline for service and parts for the Bluewhite kits and allow CNH to make their tractors “automation ready” with mounting brackets, harness wires and other components already in place.
Welbig also hopes the deal “offers some credibility and stability” to Bluewhite and gives farmers more confidence to buy new equipment from a startup.
The point of the middleman
Ag tech is a global game, with technologies developed in Israel, New Zealand and beyond making their way to Washington. But growers adopting those tools need regional expertise to get the tools running on the farm and keep them that way, said Cleveringa of Columbia Fruit.
“Things break in the field,” he said. “There’s no other way around it. It’s a tough environment to run in.” That’s true whether a machine is driven by a person or by lidar.
It happened to one of his farm’s Prospr sprayers. Though Robotics Plus has representatives in Washington training operators, siting communication towers and installing software, Burrows mechanics fixed the problem in their Yakima shop.
For its part, Robotics Plus has been cultivating relationships with growers since it was founded in 2010. Cleveringa saw early iterations of Prospr about 10 years ago in New Zealand.
When it came time for dealership arrangements, Robotics Plus took cues from those same growers, said Nathan Soich, chief commercial officer for Robotics Plus. Growers had existing relationships with Burrows, and the distributor was willing to dedicate staff to the lengthy process of trials, demos and trade shows for commercial rollout.
“We realize people are making a long-term commitment … we want to be respectful of that,” said Soich, adding that they have two new staff members in Washington now.
The company has plans to add mowing, defoliating and herbicide application packages to the Prospr.
Going first
Someone has to go first with new tools, and it’s often the grower.
Columbia Fruit Packers was one of three early adopters who bought units directly from Robotics Plus last year. (Burrows hasn’t yet sold any of its own Prospr machines. Most farmers make capital expenditures later in the year, Riel said.)
Stemilt Growers was another early adopter. Stemilt has been happy with the reliability and accuracy of the sprayers, said Bernardo Reyes, area manager. They can run a driverless machine faster than a traditional airblast sprayer, and the vehicle’s four-wheel-drive system allows it to hit each row, instead of skipping a row.
As for troubleshooting, Robotics Plus technicians have been adjusting lidar sensitivity. The machine bumped a few things in the orchard, but a sensitive shut-off bumper stopped it before any harm or damage was done. The crews also sometimes struggled to maintain connectivity with the radio tower, fastened to the roof of a shop.
Through it all, Burrows reps tagged along as Stemilt worked through such challenges. Their mechanics adjusted the wheel-base width once, Riel said.
That’s the way the triangle of grower, manufacturer and distributor must work when it comes to new technology, Riel said. And though he declined to share specifics, more new tools are on the way.
“We truly believe there’s a need for it,” he said. “We have a lot of growers that are asking us for it.” •
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