Autonomous robots to help modernize grape, wine industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Autonomous robots to help modernize grape, wine industry

#21

Post by nanomonkey » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

bergenty wrote: post #19

nanomonkey wrote: post #12

In Northern California's olive growing regions I've been noticing a trend towards tearing out old olive trees and replacing them with trees that are grown on trellises in the same fashion as grapes. This appears to be done to utilize the picking robots that were specialized for vineyards. It's interesting to think that pruning practices like espalier, coppicing and hedging could be brought back to utilize robotics ef…

Is that really a trend? Because olive trees take decades to grow and at least 3 years to bear so I have a hard time believing they’re being ripped out and restarted.

I believe some of this is due to changes in what types of olives were considered desirable. I'm not an expert, but some of the green stuffing olives have been replaced with different varieties. Also there are pests and diseases that are taking over, so newer resistant varieties are valuable replacements.

Three years is also not a terrible time period compared to other nut trees that are grown in the area, specially if harvesting can be improved to be less manual. Some of the trees that are being replaced are 80-100 years old, so the wood can be a valuable resource that will cover the costs.

Re: Autonomous robots to help modernize grape, wine industry

#22

Post by nanomonkey » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

alecco wrote: post #16

nanomonkey wrote: post #12

In Northern California's olive growing regions I've been noticing a trend towards tearing out old olive trees and replacing them with trees that are grown on trellises in the same fashion as grapes. This appears to be done to utilize the picking robots that were specialized for vineyards. It's interesting to think that pruning practices like espalier, coppicing and hedging could be brought back to utilize robotics ef…

That's weird. Most modern plantations use the "Super Intensive" method with specialized machines. https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=4RnDldkqUb4

The video displays exactly what I'm talking about though. The machinery is build around olive trees grown as hedges instead of the traditional tree shapes that requires shaking or ladders.

Olives as trees don't require wires to grow on like grape vines, sorry if that was what you thought I was implying.

Re: Autonomous robots to help modernize grape, wine industry

#23

Post by jmrm » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 12:00 AM UTC

nanomonkey wrote: post #12

In Northern California's olive growing regions I've been noticing a trend towards tearing out old olive trees and replacing them with trees that are grown on trellises in the same fashion as grapes. This appears to be done to utilize the picking robots that were specialized for vineyards. It's interesting to think that pruning practices like espalier, coppicing and hedging could be brought back to utilize robotics ef…

Here in Spain we observe the same. Having dozens of harvesting olives manually or with the help of small machines were worthwhile while big olive harvesters were rare and salaries where lower, but now we have the opposite situation.