A visiting US agritech expert is adamant automation is the key to plugging labour shortages in New Zealand, but it was a solution that required hefty investment.
Walt Dufflock, Vice President of Innovation at one of the world’s largest food growing businesses, Western Growers, has toured some of New Zealand orchards, farms and hortical operations this week.
Walt Dufflock, Vice President of Innovation at one of the world’s largest food growing businesses, Western Growers
He was brought to the country as a guest of Callaghan Innovation and keynote speaker at the apple and pears conference.
Rural Exchange caught up with Dufflock, regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on food growing, agricultural technology and innovation with 30 years of experience at Silicon Valley tech startups and a fifth-generation family farmer.
He said the main topic on his tour of the country this week was the chronic labour shortages that every grower and every country was facing.
"It’s both an ageing workforce where the labour is harder to get because they’re ageing out and young people aren't interested in the job as much, and its increasingly costlier workforce because of the regulations."
Whilst New Zealand had it’s own set of regulatory constraints, he compared it to California which saw an 800% hike in regulatory costs of owning and operating crop farms which in turn impacted the hourly rate the workers can get.
"That's all pushing the need for automation because as the workers get harder to find and they get more costly, the opportunity for automation is both larger and more critical so its been a lot of automation discussions,” he said.
Despite some good work being made in the automation and robotic space for planting, weeding and thinning by start up companies, one constant area of struggle was trying to replicate the labour that went into harvesting.
"The hard work is picking the fruit or picking the veg off the bed or off the tree and that is some really skilled labour that the human crews do and it's really hard to convert that into a robot that can do the same things.”
Fruit pickers working hard manually collecting fruit.
Check out the full interview with Rural Exchange’s Hamish McKay and Dom George and Walt Dufflock above.
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