Ripe strawberries

NREC is going to strawberry fields – namely, the Lassen Canyon Nursery, which grows strawberry plants for commercial and home gardeners.  LCN gave NREC a $50,000 grant to study how to fully automate strawberry plant harvesting. 

Harvesting strawberry plants is a complex, labor-intensive job.  The California-based LCN employs hundreds of plant trimmers every harvest season.  After the plants have been dug out of the ground and taken to the work sheds, the trimmers disentangle the plants, prune the mature strawberry plants, and snip the runners to their daughter plants.  While they’re at it, they inspect the plants, cull the ones that aren’t shippable, and count the good plants.  The strawberry plants are then packaged and shipped to growers worldwide. 

Like other farming operations, LCN faces escalating labor costs and a shortage of seasonal workers.  So it called upon NREC to develop a robotic system that would reduce or eliminate the need for plant trimmers.  NREC scientists and engineers will use the grant money to study ways to successfully automate the entire process of strawberry plant harvesting.  This is a challenging problem.  LCN produces 100 to 300 million plants during the 10-week harvest season, so any solution must be able to process large numbers of plants at a high rate of speed.  The nursery grows 30 different sizes and varieties of strawberry plants, making it difficult to sort plants visually.  The system must also be able to operate in all kinds of weather and lighting conditions.   If these problems can be solved, though, LCN is looking at strawberry fields forever.

Strawberry plants in the field. Note the runners between
the larger mother plants and smaller daughter plants.

A field of strawberry plants at the Lassen Canyon
Nursery. LCN operates several strawberry plant farms
in northern California.