Gosia Wozniacka and Terence Chea
Seattle Times
July 15, 2013
On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a
wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants.
Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure
the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field
of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last
frontier of agricultural mechanization – fruits and vegetables destined for the
fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because
they’re sensitive to bruising.
Read more
Monday, July 15, 2013
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