Automation in kiwifruit industry means fewer but skilled workers

Kiwifruit packhouses are looking to automation to keep up with the amount of fruit being grown.

An automated packing line at MPAC meant the packhouse needed 80% fewer seasonal workers, a Zespri report said.

Meanwhile, Trevelyan packhouse ran a fully automated box-filling, tray-lining, and bulk-filling machine, EastPack had a $28 million fruit grader, and Humes ran a machine that packed 8000 trays of kiwifruit every hour, with a team of only 30 people.

Chief executive of New Zealand Kiwifruit Growers Colin Bond said automation would be important because the industry harvested more hectares every year.

The industry needed 24,000 workers to help with a 190 million-tray harvest last year, and would need an additional 1000 workers when the industry reached a potential harvest of 200 million trays next year, Bond said. A tray of kiwifruit held about 30 fruit.

"With automation in post-harvest [packhouses] we're increasingly confident we can keep our seasonal workforce requirements the same for harvest [in orchards], but only if we continue to make 5% incremental gains in automation," Bond said.

The kiwifruit crop was much smaller than usual this year because of major weather events that destroyed crops.

"We are slowing down our need for seasonal workers, but also increasing the skill set of those workers because they’re no longer just putting fruit into a box, they’re running the machines that put fruit into a box," he said.

Part of the motivation for automation was certainty, less need to rely on a transient workforce, but also a desire to improve the productivity of labour and give them skills, he said.

"It allows you to employ people more permanently, and pay them higher wages," he said. "If our industry wasn't growing, then we could just invest in the automation to improve efficiency. But we are growing, so we also have to invest in cool storage capacity. That's one of the tensions, the competing uses of capital."

A study done by the industry showed it could cost as much as $800 million to fully automate post-harvest infrastructure, Bond said.

It was "not inconceivable to think that" the industry had already spent close to $1 billion to grow capacity and automation already, he said.

Chief executive of Eastpack Hamish Simson said the company had heavily invested in automation for five years.

Eastpack used a $28m fruit grader and also had a washer-grader which was the largest grader in the Southern Hemisphere.

A grader used visual technology to grade the quality of fruit and select specific ones for export or to discard bad quality fruit.

Grading was traditionally done by people, but machine graders that used cameras were more consistent, he said.

"Well-managed human handling can be the same as machine handling. The difference in machining handling is that it's consistent. Achieving consistency with human handling requires intense training and a learning curve to achieve high effectiveness," he said.

Automating did not reduce the number of staff drastically, but the number of trays packed for the number of staff employed went up "massively", Simson said.

"When you get a lot of defects in a line, you know, your only way to manage that before was to throw more people at it. But with a camera it's just processing speed.

"Most of your people are deployed around what we call materials handling, making boxes, putting bags in boxes, putting fruit in those boxes, closing those boxes, labelling them and stacking them on a pallet.

"A big push for automation over the last three or four years was in materials handling and higher-speed box makers, a machine can build two boxes every second, if you're going to stack that sort of volume with people you'd need an army," Simson said.

Automation meant employing capable technicians, who could work machinery safely.

"They are by the nature more skilled positions that we kind of train and retain rather than completely seasonalise."

The grader might have cost $28m, but by the time infrastructure had been set up around it to make it run smoothly the cost almost doubled, he said.

"It's wildly expensive, you can't expect a return of investment in less than five years."

Managing director at Trevelyans James Trevelyan ​ said he was advised not to automate until the business could be sure it used labour as efficiently as possible.

If it did not, it would not be able to determine the return on investment from automating.

The cost of labour was a big motivator for Trevelyans to automate, he said.

Return on investment on a $5m machine was about three years, which was "acceptable".

Machines were often also just as efficient as the operator, and an operator who was tired would influence the efficiency of a machine, he said.

The season was quite tough because of hail and floods and Trevelyan was "careful" about automating, but would "keep going", he said.