Building the next generation blueberry harvester

COVID-19 is creating an existential and widely publicised threat to the otherwise vibrant UK soft fruit sector. The lockdown in March limited access to labour and the UK government launched the Pick for Britain campaign to support the sector as a contingency. However, despite this picking costs have increased, due to the need to train the workforce and some farms have left crops unpicked. Some farms have reported high incidences of COVID-19 outbreaks amongst pickers. There is, therefore, an urgent need to drive labour productivity through automation.

This project's objective is to develop and demonstrate a fully automatic blueberry harvesting machine, one of the UK's most important soft fruit crops. The proposed machine is developed from a prior IUK feasibility study (IUK11295). The project will construct a full-scale working machine, including full CAD designs and designed for onward manufacturing. It will be fully electric and include new image analysis systems to optimise crop quality at harvest. The machine removes berries from the bush by the use of innovative shaking systems and can fit inside the small greenhouses and polythene tunnels used by all UK and many EU blueberry producers. Following this project we will have a fully designed machine, which can then be manufactured at scale for widescale deployment by UK growers in the 2021\.

This application creates new business opportunities in farm automation but also underpins the economic and environmental sustainability of the soft fruit sector. The industry domain scale is significant; blueberries are now the second largest soft fruit sold in the UK (£337m p.a.). The UK industry has been expanding to meet demand but even so we only have a 7% share of this market. Blueberries are well adapted to the UK summer climate and there is considerable opportunity to grow the UK share. However, the crop requires large amounts of typically migrant labour to pick the fruit, which represents c.40% of production costs. Driving labour productivity in the sector is crucial for a COVID response but also underpins longer term productivity. A more productive UK production base secures environmental sustainability, simply because there will be a reduced requirement to import fruit from overseas producers.

The project will be delivered by a well established consortium led by Berry Garden Growers, the UK's largest grower-owned co-operative of soft fruit. In addition the machine will be tested by Lutton Farms, a member of Berry Gardens and the UK's largest grower of blueberries.