Cal Poly Strawberry Center receives funding to help automate strawberry farming in California

Jul 17, 2023

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Strawberry Center and the United States Department of Agriculture’s research agency recently received a federal grant to focus on tools to help automate strawberry farming in California.

The Strawberry Center’s goal is to use research and education to increase the sustainability of California’s strawberry industry.

According to the Center’s Director Gerald Holmes, strawberry farmers don’t have enough workers during the summer to keep up with the crops, but automation will help.

“If you don't pick it, it's gonna rot, right? That's why things are so urgent a lot of times in agriculture because you have a perishable commodity. If you don't pick them at the optimum timing, they're either too ripe or not ripe enough. So you got to be there just in time.”

Holmes said the production of strawberries is a three billion dollar industry, and about 90% of the nation’s strawberries come from the Central Coast, from Watsonville to Oxnard. Which is why caring for and learning about the crop is important.

In recent years the center developed a lygus bug vacuum that sucks bugs out of fields so they don’t damage strawberry seeds.

It was designed by 25 Cal Poly students and three professors, with the input of growers and manufacturers.

The Strawberry Center’s Director of Automation, John Lin said the vacuum is one example of the kind of tools that researchers at the Strawberry Center hope to create with the grant.

“[The] bug eats the seeds of the strawberry which causes a deformation of the berry. It does about 200 million dollars of damage to California each year. So basically, growers [are] looking for a non-chemical way to manage that.”

The vacuum helps strawberry farmers use less pesticide on their crops. Lin says so far about 60% of the industry has adopted some form of the vacuum’s design to use on their own strawberry crops.

Priorities for the new grant also include automating the process of cutting runners off strawberry plants and clipping caps off of strawberries.