Robots won’t be replacing capable farmhands any time soon, but as Oregon’s farmers begin working their fields and crop rows this spring they are increasingly turning to automation and computer technology to save fuel, time, expensive fertilizer and labor.

Stahlbush Island Farms in Corvallis, Ore., one of the state’s pioneers in organic and sustainable agriculture, replaced nine conventional tractors with four equipped with Global Positioning System technology, allowing them to operate faster, straighter and with much greater precision.

The farm’s goal is to reduce chemical and fertilizer use through mechanization and computer technology, “Precision farming,” as it’s called, allows for that substitution, owner Karla Chambers said.

“Typically the first exchange for chemicals is labor and the second is technology,” she said. “If you want to get away from herbicides, you have a human labor solution or a technology solution.”

Simply reducing the amount of tractor overlap by using a guidance system while working a field saves fuel and time and lessens soil compaction. Technology has allowed Stahlbush Island Farms to reduce what are called “inputs” –such as seed, fertilizer, water –by 2 percent or 3 percent, Chambers said.

“Just run the math on that over 2,000 to 10,000 acres, and that’s pretty huge,” she said.

When Dave Kauer of Amity put in a new 40-acre blueberry field last summer, a crew from a farm implement dealership used a GPS-guided tractor to mark where to plant each bush in a perfect checkerboard pattern.

Straight rows are crucial to efficient care and harvest of permanent bushes or orchard trees, and a crew using the old manual method of stringing cable at right angles might have taken several days. One man and a tractor did it in eight hours.

Blueline Manufacturing, based outside Yakima, builds self-propelled, self-steering harvest platforms that transport workers down apple orchard rows at a level where they can prune, thin or pick fruit.

The device can eliminate ladders, and it stemmed from a time-motion study that showed workers weren’t picking 42 percent of the time: They were moving, setting or climbing up and down ladders and lugging fruit to bins instead.

Company President Gregg Marrs said he’s sold 30 to 40 of the platforms, which cost $35,000 to $60,000. They can pay for themselves in labor savings within a year and a half, Marrs said.

“As time goes on, it’s an accepted fact that there will be more and more technology entering into agriculture,” he said. “A big change is coming.”

Fisher Implement, a farm equipment and supply chain with eight Oregon stores, now has three employees assigned solely to precision farming sales and service.

Detailed field maps Technology is available to create a “prescription” map of fields, said Fisher salesman Eric Wavra, who works out of the company’s Salem store. Compiling data from ground nutrient sampling, farmers can determine the fertilizer needs of field sections.

That data can be downloaded to a GPS system. When the tractor reaches an area that’s been mapped, it signals the applicator to deliver more or less fertilizer as required.

The savings can add up quickly. Urea fertilizer, prized for its high nitrogen content, costs $600 per ton –and the standard application on an expansive wheat field may be 325 pounds per acre. If that can be reduced because the soil’s in good shape, the farmer saves money.

“It’s not in the financial best interests of our customers to be over-applying,” Wavra said. “That’s where these systems pay back very quickly.”

Wavra said farmers often ask him what change technology will bring next. “I always tell the guys, ‘You tell me,’ ” he said. “All the farmers out here are a bunch of troubleshooters and test engineers –a giant think tank, basically.”

More technology is spreading. Infrared identification of weeds allows spot application of herbicides, reducing the amount used around crops. Center-pivot or drip line irrigation systems use 25 percent to 50 percent less water than older sprinkler systems.

Large retailers –beginning with Wal-Mart in 2005 –are responding to food safety concerns by encouraging or even requiring growers to use radio frequency identification, or RFID, to track the harvest, handling and shipment of fruits and vegetables.

Tags for tracking Electronic product code tags attached to crops or livestock can store information about the variety, where it came from and when it was harvested. The RFID technology also can track and record temperatures in shipping containers, important to ensuring quality.

Meanwhile, the Internet allows farmers to market directly to customers, said Brent Searle, special assistant to the director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

“That’s their storefront, which wasn’t possible 10 years ago,” Searle said. “People all over the world can access one little farm.”

Technology will result in farm management decisions increasingly being made on a “data-centric” basis, said Derek Morikawa, chief executive officer of Vision Robotics Corp. in San Diego. Data overlaid with GPS mapping could provide “tree by tree, vine by vine” information on pest detection, water or fertilizer needs, fruit quality, harvest timing and yields.

Even more stark changes may be on the way. Morikawa looks down the row several years and sees robots picking the Pacific Northwest’s apples and pears.

His company is working on a pair that would work in tandem: A scout robot, loaded with stereoscopic cameras, would creep down a row and map the location of each piece of fruit.

The information would be transmitted to a trailing harvester, which would send multiple arms into the foliage and gently pick the crop with humanlike mechanical hands.

Robot pruners Vision Robotics has built a robot grapevine pruner and is perhaps three to four years away from developing a fruit picker for field testing, Morikawa said. Washington fruit growers and California citrus growers are working with the company.

Morikawa said he can imagine, within 10 years, a field supervisor sitting in a trailer in the middle of a large orchard or vineyard, monitoring the work of five to 10 robots.

“You can see this is going to happen,” he said. “It may not be us, but it’s definitely going to happen.”

Labor –or the lack of it –is driving the interest in robotics, Morikawa said. Fruit picking and other farm labor crews are largely made up of Latino workers, and by some estimates 75 percent of them have what’s delicately called “documentation issues,” meaning they may be in the country illegally. Farmers worry that immigration policies may wipe out a crucial labor source.

“If labor continues to be cheap and plentiful, there’s not going to be much of a demand to have us come in and help out,” Morikawa said. “I think the writing’s on the wall that (farmers) need technological partners, and they need to look for something to fill in the gap.”

That’s what Clark Seavert wants to tap into. Seavert hopes to build an agriculture technology center at Oregon State University’s North Willamette research and extension station in Aurora.

As he envisions it, the center would not develop new technology but would work with the private sector to adapt technology to agricultural uses.

Seavert, the research station superintendent, estimates a technology center would require two or three faculty positions and cost $350,000 to $400,000 per year to operate.

Seavert plans to host an agricultural technology summit this summer to get the idea off the ground.

Copyright 2008 The Oregonian