Published 3:17 am Monday, October 22, 2018
WAPATO, Wash. — It was a tight squeeze in the 10-foot-wide rows. A few limbs ladened with Fuji apples were broken as the Bandit Xpress-DBR harvest assist platform navigated the Valicoff Fruit Co. orchard with four pickers filling the first bin in 20 minutes without using picking bags or ladders.
That was decent, but in time the crew got faster.
The crew was learning on the job with a Burrows Tractor representative and Robert Valicoff, president of Valicoff Fruit, shouting instructions like not putting too many apples at once into the small, padded buckets strapped to the workers’ chests that fed vacuum tubes leading to the apple bin.
H-2A-visa foreign guestworkers from Mexico, they spoke little English but said they liked it.
As J.J. Dagorret, inventor of the Bandit Xpress, says, pickers take to the Bandit-DBR “like ducks to water” because they don’t have the weight of conventional picking bags and the added work of dumping them into bins.
The goal is to have the Bandit Xpress-DBR commercially available through Burrows next year. It’s likely the last picking innovation short of robots. All of it is important because the supply of labor has been growing tighter for years.
Five years ago, Dagorret, owner of Automated Ag Systems of Moses Lake, Wash., began selling his Bandit Xpress work platform for pruning and picking in orchards. It eliminated ladders as pickers riding on the platform picked into bags and dumped bags into bins that the machine picked up for filling and then lowered for tractors to haul away.
Valicoff said he helped Dagorret draw the design and that “he built it just like we drew it.” Dagorret said he presented the design they talked about.
Valicoff bought one of the first platforms in 2013 but hasn’t been able to use it as much as he would like because he doesn’t have enough newer plantings and it doesn’t work as well in older plantings of larger trees.
Dagorret says the Bandit Xpress is 35 percent more efficient and safer than pickers using ladders. He built and sold 725 of them from 2013 through 2017 and is building 65 this year, plus 65 Bandit Cubs, which are 17 inches narrower. The Xpress sells for $64,000, the Cub for $68,000.
Last winter, Phil Brown, owner of DBR Conveyor Concepts in Conklin, Mich., asked Dagorret if the DBR vacuum tube and bin filler could be placed on the Bandit Xpress. Dagorret was game. Brown had designed and built a much larger machine that never caught on because of its size.
This harvest season the Bandit Xpress-DBR has been field tested in Washington and California. It improves picking efficiency by about 85 percent over ladders and by 40 percent over the standard Bandit Xpress without the DBR, Dagorret says.
It can fill bins in 4 to 5 minutes versus 10 to 12 minutes for pickers on a platform with bags, he said.
Large companies including Stemilt Growers LLC of Wenatchee, Zirkle Fruit of Selah and Washington Fruit and Produce Co. of Yakima have tested the Bandit Xpress-DBR along with smaller companies like Valicoff Fruit.
“Everybody wants to try it and the feedback is good. People are surprised that it doesn’t bruise the apples, which is what everyone is focused on,” Dagorret said.
Honeycrisp apples are sensitive to bruising, but the bruising rate with the machine is just 6.4 percent, which is a good low number, he said.
The vacuum tubes are 9 feet long and suck apples through at a rate of 15 feet per second. A decelerator slows them down for the bin filler.
The main issue, Dagorret said, is training pickers to allow a split second between apples they place in their padded buckets that feed the tubes so apples don’t collide with each other as they decelerate. Pickers in front have to remember to concentrate on picking higher fruit and leave lower fruit for the pickers in the rear standing a foot or so lower.
The only other issues are machine noise and the bin filler filling two corners of a bin faster than the other two corners. But those are both easy fixes, Dagorret said.
His goal this summer and fall was to get as many growers trying it as possible to get feedback to work out any quirks before commercial sales through Burrows next year.
“I wasn’t sure how pickers would accept it because they never like anything new. But they love it because they no longer have the weight of a picking bag,” he said.
The DBR vacuum system will sell for $35,000 to $40,000 each and will mount right on the Xpress or Cub, Dagorret and Brown said.
The idea is a functional, dependable product that is affordable, they said.
Valicoff said he’s impressed and would like to see someone offer contracted use to smaller growers like himself who may not want to buy their own. He’s also interested in contract robotic spraying and mowing.
Valicoff said he sees the machine as a bridge to robotic picking that’s coming in two to three years.
Brown said commercial robotic harvesters are probably five to six years away and are slowed, as much as anything, by needing trees designed for robotic pruning and picking.
Several years ago, Dan Steere, CEO of Abundant Robotics, of Hayward, Calif., said he would have a robotic apple picker in commercial production in the fall of 2018. That hasn’t happened. He declined comment this month on his continued field testing.
Avi Kahani, CEO of FFRobotics, of Emeq-Heffer, Israel, said his goal is to have his robotic apple picker ready for commercial use in the fall of 2019. He was to field test it this fall in Washington with the Bandit Xpress-DBR and said he still hopes to. Dagorret said he’s hopeful but doubtful since the season is winding down.
“If Avi gets his machine here,” Dagorret said, “I think we would blow right by Abundant Robotics. Avi’s is electrical hands grabbing the fruit instead of a vacuum sucking the fruit off the tree so it takes a lot less horsepower and less space.”
