Posts Tagged: labor

Machines can help wine grape industry survive labor shortage

Wine grape growers in California and elsewhere face increasing labor costs and severe labor shortages, making it difficult to manage and harvest a vineyard while maintaining profitability. Growers are increasingly turning to machines for pruning, canopy management and harvesting, but how well these practices are executed can substantially affect yield and quality. A new review by researchers at the University of California, Davis, published in the journal Catalyst, provides guidelines for growers to make the best use of machines.

“Wine grape laborers have been virtually nonexistent. People don't want to work in vineyards anymore because it's remote, tough work,” said Kaan Kurtural, UC Davis professor of viticulture andenology andUC Cooperative Extension specialist. “There is now machinery available to do everything without touching a vineyard.”

Kurtural has designed a “touchless” experimental vineyard at the UC Davis Oakville Station to help growers understand how machines can help them cope with the labor shortage. While machines reduce the need for seasonal manual labor, they do not eliminate it. The degree of labor reduction depends on growing region, grapevine type and the number of practices growers mechanize.

The review provides guidance on using machines for winter pruning, canopy management and harvesting as well as how to design a grape vineyard for machines before planting. Videos showing the operation of different types of machinery and practices can also be found in the review. 

Economic savings, quality grapes

About 90% of the wine grapes crushed in the U.S. are mechanically harvested. Previous studies have found about a 50% savings in labor costs from using machines to harvest instead of hand harvesting. 

“Using more mechanization in a vineyard beyond just harvesting can also reduce labor costs without affecting grape quality.” Kurtural said.

Mechanical pruning, for example, can save between 60% to 80% of labor operation costs per acre compared to manual pruning alone. One experiment in the San Joaquin Valley, where more than 50% of California's wine grapes are grown, also showed using mechanical canopy management machines to manage merlot grapes resulted in twice the amount of color. The more color, or higher anthocyanin concentrations, the better the quality. It can significantly improve returns from vineyards in California's heartland.

Kurtural said there are machines available to manage canopies, including machines for leaf removal, shoot thinning and trunk suckering. Kurtural noted that the machines are American made, developed by researchers at the University of Arkansas and commercialized by manufacturers in Fresno and Woodland, California.

The review was co-authored by Matthew Fidelibus, UC Cooperative Extension viticulture specialist at UC Davis, based at UC Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center. Financial support for the research came from the American Vineyard Foundation and Bronco Wine Company.

Original post at https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/machines-can-help-wine-grape-industry-survive-labor-shortage. 

California table olives - An economic dilemma

How do you use California table olives in your family meals? On pizza? In salads? In Mediterranean dishes? As part of your holiday relish trays?

Today, California is the only U.S. state to commercially produce olives. Over 95 percent of production is canned as California-style black-ripe or green-ripe olives.

California table olive (Olea europaea L.) growers rely on the primary ‘Manzanillo’ cultivar. To assure absolute quality, harvesting is done by hand. Using ladders, crews hand-harvest the olives off each branch, tree by tree. There can be 1,000 olives on a tree, so each crewmember can pick only two or three trees a day. Hand harvesting expenses account for roughly 45 to 60 percent of gross return for growers; and increasing labor costs adversely affect California’s global competitiveness in the table olive market. This is an unsustainable economic situation. California olive growers cannot survive spending more than half their gross incomes on harvest labor.

To help California olive growers deal with this economic dilemma, UC Cooperative Extension specialist Louise Ferguson and her team of research collaborators are focusing on the mechanical harvest of table olives, thus relieving the growers’ total dependency on the costly and shrinking numbers of available hand laborers.

Mechanizing the harvest of table olives presents some unique challenges. The tree canopy and trunk must be adapted to interface with the harvester, avoiding damage to the tree, and the fruit must be collected with minimum bruising. Mechanical harvesting is particularly difficult with table olives. Tree trunk damage, bruised fruit and poor removal efficiency have limited its acceptance.

New technologies have been developed to address these problems: trunk shakers and canopy contact harvesting heads. The most limiting factor, fruit damage, has been eliminated. The trunk shakers can be used in new high-density orchards developed by Ferguson and her team. The canopy harvester can be used in existing orchards if trees are pruned into hedgerows and in the new high-density orchards.

“I think we’ve turned the corner on mechanical harvesting of table olives,” Ferguson says. “And that makes me happy. Table olives are a traditional California crop – they came here with the early Franciscian missionaries. I would hate to see California growers lose their locally-grown advantage in the table olive market. We could actually see a resurgence in the industry.”

Olive trunk shaker

Olive canopy contact harvesting head

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