A Moveable Harvest: An investigation into using mobile platforms for picking apples

Farm businesses producing fruit for the fresh fruit market require significant amounts of labour, especially for harvesting. In other agricultural industries, like cropping, the reliance on labour has reduced because machines have replaced labour. At the moment, machines do not replace labour for horticultural businesses supplying the fresh fruit market, consequently the labour cost is significant. However, machines, like a mobile platform, may improve the efficiency of labour or reduce the need for particular skills. Mobile platforms are not new and have been a consideration for fruit growers since the 1970s, but rising costs of labour has increased interest in investing in them. Research in the United States, Europe and South Africa into the benefits of mobile platforms has found, in some cases, that using a platform can improve productivity and occupational health and safety, but the findings are inconclusive. The aim of this investigation was to identify the labour needs for Australian growers supplying apples to the fresh fruit market and to investigate and form a view about the role a mobile platform has against other tools that can be used by growers to assist labour. This study has found that the ‘best’ combination of equipment, machinery and labour to use to assist in the main production tasks of horticultural businesses depends on the many and varied characteristics of the business, the segment of the market the farmer sells into, the operator and the skills and cost of labour.