We’re in the middle of a farm just east of Oxnard. Teams of farmworkers are busy harvesting some large, tasty strawberries.
The sunny weather is key to the strawberry crop on the 100 acre GoodFarms ranch. But the ranch is hoping to use the sun to go solar powered with a key part of its harvesting process.
They are hoping to go solar with their harvesting aid machines. They are motorized trailers on wheels, which move slowly through fields so farmworkers don’t have to carry crates of just picked strawberries to trucks on adjacent roads.
"Historically, what we would do is put a trailer on each end of the block (the end of the row)," said Matt Conroy, who is District Manager for GoodFarms. "The harvester from each trailer would walk in halfway, pick what they needed to pick, walk out with their box, and put it on the trailer, get a new box and walk back in. There's a lot of walking back and forth."
They went to harvest aid machines, which are gas driven, and slowly move up the aisles of the field, so farmworkers can just take a few steps to drop off their strawberries, and get a fresh box. "It's a gas-driven moving table, for lack of a better description," said Conroy.
He said since the farm started using the harvest aid machines a decade ago, they saw a 30% increase in productivity, and that led to a 30% increase in workers wages. Still, not all strawberry farms use them. They did find a problem with the rolling tables.
"They are powered by a 21 horsepower lawn mower engine," said Conroy. "The engine's running the whole time. It's loud, it's noisy, and if you are not keeping up on your maintenance, it's smoky."
Conroy says they connected with a Spanish company called Agrobot, which is focused on creating technologically advanced farming equipment. They came up with an environmentally friendly version of the harvest aid, one which uses solar power and an electric motor.
"This is solar, so we don't need gas, we don't need oil, we don't have emissions, there's no noise," said Juan Bravo, with Agrobot.
They created a high tech, robotic version of the harvesting aid, which has onboard sensors to allow it to travel up and down the rows of strawberry plants independently.
He uses a remote to guide the machine into a strawberry field. It can also be controlled with an app on a smartphone.
The prototype has been tested for months on the farm. Bravo said because it’s solar powered, it will save $1000 to $1500 a month in operational costs.
Ventura County Air Pollution Control District Officials say technology like this is vital, because despite improvements, the county doesn’t meet many federal air pollution control standards.
"This is the first zero emission vehicle that's solely for the Air Pollution Control District’s Karin Grennan. "This is where we need to go in the future if we are going to get rid of liquid fuel on farms."
Grennan said GoodFarms has been awarded a $50,000 grant, which covers about a third of the cost of two of the solar power machines.
The money comes from the District’s Clean Air Fund. It was set up in the 1990's with a grant, and then spins off interest from the endowment for clean air projects.
GoodFarms has 22 of the Harvest Aid machines, which produce more than 400,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year. Conroy said they’d eventually love for them to be all solar. They're starting with two of them, thanks to the grant.
Conroy notes there’s a nice bonus. They’ve discovered the unmanned solar powered machine can be equipped with ultraviolet lights for night use, to control mildew which might otherwise be treated with pesticides.
The panels, and batteries supply more than enough charge for the machines to run all night long.
As part of the grant agreement, GoodFarms will share information on the operation of the machines with interested farmers. Conroy believes in a few years, they will become the industry standard, and at the same time help reduce air pollution coming from strawberry farms.
