Between a mechanical harvester being developed for the fresh market by USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Fumiomi Takeda and other scientists and a new fresh market harvester from Holland scheduled to be available in the U.S. in 2021, blueberry harvest options could expand considerably in the near future.

Patented brushes, ensuring less ground loss.

Both machines have shown promise in recent years as engineers race to develop machines that can offset a reduction in the manual labor force felt by growers here and in Europe.

In a presentation at the 2019 Oregon Blueberry Conference, Marcel Driessen of the Dutch agricultural engineering firm FineField, said the labor supply in The Netherlands has been decreasing at a rate of 20 percent a year of late.

“We work hard to fill jobs,” Driessen said.

As a result, FineField has been working on developing a blueberry harvester that can be converted for fresh and processed harvests. Called the Harvy500, the self-propelled harvester includes sheeting for soft catching to prevent bruising, brushes to softly catch inside and around the bush, and several automated features that simplify and speed harvest, including automated steering, automated leveling and an automated crate exchanger that replaces full crates with empty ones and stacks the filled crates in preparation for transporting off site.

“I think we need to be flexible,” said Peter Geurts, an engineer with FineField developing the machine. “Every grower has his own opinion on how he wants to detach. And it also depends on which market you are serving. Today, maybe the prices are bad so the fruit goes to processing. The next day prices are good, so, you take the same platform, you take the shaker out and you put people in there and you pull and drop the berries by hand.

“I think there will be a lot of different ways to do your detaching and you need to be able to switch it from day to day,” he said.

The machine is designed to harvest 1,000 pounds an hour of fresh-market fruit, utilizing four pickers and no driver.

“We think it will be at least twice as fast as hand-picking and have exactly the same quality,” he said.

For processed fruit, the machine operates without pickers, using standard shaking techniques to detach berries from bushes, while keeping in place the sheeting and automated features to improve fruit quality and reduce losses.

FineField also has a Harvy200 harvester available for purchase now. Previously called the Easy Harvester, Geurts described it as “a simple harvesting aid” with low investment costs that offers a good middle ground between handpicking and over the row machines. Purchasers have the option to purchase a sheeting to ensure softer landing for berries.

For more information on FineField harvesters, go to www.finefield.nl.