December 2019 - 1

Randy Gardner: Tomato
breeder extraordinaire
Vectorite product uses
pollinators for delivery
9
16
19
Benefits of cover
crops in watermelon
crops eyed
December 2019 | Volume 53 |
Issue 12
ORGANIC
OBSTACLES
By Dean Peterson
VGN Correspondent
North Carolina is productive
vegetable country with good soils,
good climate and access to urban
markets, but the September hurricane
season is changing the industry. One
example is Black River Organic Farm
near Ivanhoe.
Most of 2019's Hurricane Dorian
stayed out to sea and it brought a few
inches of rain into North Carolina's
coastal plain. But Hurricane Matthew
in 2016 brought 18 inches to Black
River Organic Farm and Hurricane
Florence in 2018 accounted for twice
that amount.
" We got 37 inches of rain in just
a few days, " said Stefan Hartmann,
owner of Black River Organic Farm.
" It was an unheard of amount
of water. That water had to go
somewhere. "
The farm's four propane tanks
floated out into a swamp. One
greenhouse was demolished - not
by wind - but by pounding rain.
Crops were destroyed. The original
farmhouse had four and a half feet of
Stefan Hartmann, right, owner of Black
River Organic Farm near Ivanhoe, North
Carolina, is considering a change in his
crop selection to reduce threats from the
region's hurricanes.
water in it. Other homes and buildings
were flooded.
A new planting of longleaf pine
intended for the pine straw market
was hammered and half of the
seedlings were lost. That brought
uncertainty into the plan to diversify
into forestry. Pine straw is the annual
See CHANGES, page 6
Investment, need drive in-soil strawberry harvester
By Stephen Kloosterman
Associate Editor
Investment, a groundbreaking
" commercialized " strawberry harvest
and swelling grower interest add up
to a good year for Advanced Farm
Technologies (AFT).
The Davis, California-based
company's T-6 robotic strawberry
harvester is one of just a handful
of machines that are being taken
seriously by the industry, due to
increased labor challenges.
The T-6 automatically identifies
red berries and picks them with
two robotic arms, while a human
operator drives it over the in-soil
strawberry beds.
Kyle Cobb, one of AFT's four
founders, said the T-6 conducted a
commercialized harvest last season
on a 100-acre farm in the Santa
Maria region of California. The
harvested strawberries, he said, were
sold into the retail market.
The
harvester
rolls over
strawberry
beds 48-56
inches wide,
and can adjust
for different heights, Cobb said. A key
piece of the work was finding a soft
High-Tech Tools
2019
touch for the robotic arms.
" You can't do anything else before
you figure out how to handle the
fruit gently and carefully, " Cobb said.
He added, though, that " we're
still learning things every day. " One
of the goals for future models is to
remove the need for a human driver.
The robots aren't for sale. So far,
the strawberry picker works on a
piece-rate basis. The AFT website
welcomes growers to schedule a
demonstration. Cobb said he didn't
know when the technology would be
more widely available to growers.
See HARVESTER, page 7
December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2019
