British farmers have been presented with a solution to beat the shortage of fruit pickers post-Brexit - hiring a robot.
The machine, developed by Dogtooth Technologies, is said to be able to harvest to 200kg strawberries a day - and it doesn't need a visa or a toilet break.
Even before Brexit, farmers had been complaining that they were finding it increasingly hard to recruit labour to pick their summer harvests.
And last week a party of growers - including wine producers - attended a demonstration of robotic fruit picking organised by Produced In Kent to learn how the robots might help them in future.
Founder and CEO of Dogtooth Technologies, Dr Duncan Robertson, said: ”Go back a few hundred years, before the Agricultural Revolution, and farming used to employ about one person for every hectare.
The machine, developed by Dogtooth Technologies, is said to be able to harvest to 200kg strawberries a day - and it doesn't need a visa or a toilet break.
Even before Brexit, farmers had been complaining that they were finding it increasingly hard to recruit labour to pick their summer harvests.
And last week a party of growers - including wine producers - attended a demonstration of robotic fruit picking organised by Produced In Kent to learn how the robots might help them in future.
Founder and CEO of Dogtooth Technologies, Dr Duncan Robertson, said: ”Go back a few hundred years, before the Agricultural Revolution, and farming used to employ about one person for every hectare.
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00The key challenge from the customer perspective is to recruit enough high quality and experienced
00:22picking labour. Increasingly it's difficult to persuade young people to take temporary
00:28jobs picking fruit here in the UK and it's also difficult to find sufficiently skilled
00:35labour. Picking is not low skilled work, it needs a lot of expertise and practice.
00:41And so we think it's inevitable that robotic automation will help to fill the gap left by
00:48a shrinking workforce. We've built several generations of picking robots, our fifth
00:55generation robot is increasingly able to make a meaningful difference to the harvest requirements
01:02on the farm. It's very productive, capable of picking broadly as much fruit during the
01:08course of the day as a person.
01:25you