THE sight of fruit rotting on trees in Stanthorpe and strawberries withering on the bushes in the Sunshine Coast this year drove home a hard truth that growers know all too well.

There aren’t enough Australians willing to pick the fruit and vegetables we all expect to be in our fridges.

Because when the international borders closed, no amount of government incentives and schemes to coax urban Aussies into the fields could replace the flow of seasonal workers upon whom growers have come to rely.

But Queensland researchers are coming up with technologies which might provide another solution to labour shortages: robots.

CQ University is currently developing what it says will be the world’s first mango auto-harvesting robot, with prototype testing underway on a Yeppoon farm.

 Led by Professor Kerry Walsh, the team began its journey towards robot pickers several years ago by coming up with technology to non-invasively test the quality of fruit.

That is, to see if fruit is ripe without cutting it open.

They did this using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology that measures a fruit’s dry matter, or sugar content.

Yeppoon tropical fruit farmer Ian Groves said the NIRS “guns” enabled him to walk the orchard testing fruit to know when they were ready for “spot picks” and when they were “all ready”.

“It just means we can get our start date correct so that we are picking fully mature fruit that the customer is going to be happy with,” he said.

The researchers were also applying “machine vision” technology in the packing shed, sorting fruit by colour and weight.

“We could see the grower practice of trying to estimate fruit yield, that is how much crop was on the tree, so that they could be organised in terms of labour requirements, pack house requirements and that was all being done manually,” Professor Walsh said.

“That led us to a new line of work, looking at machine vision in the fields, rather than just machine vision in the packhouse, taking it into the field to estimate crop load.

“The next step on from that, of course, having seen the fruit, is to try and reach out and pick the fruit – to automate the harvest.”

While the researchers are still developing “robotic harvesting techniques to overcome labour shortages”, Mr Groves said their technology was already in the field helping to maximise the efficiency of his harvest.

“It is actually getting more advanced, so the machinery is able to identify and count fruit in the orchard and last year it turned out to be only a few percent wrong from the actual count of mangoes that were in that entire block,” the grower said.

“Now that technology is also able to give us the size range of fruit.

“So, knowing how much fruit is in a block, knowing when it’s going to be mature, knowing the size of the fruit, means we can schedule our workforce, we can order the right number of cartons, we can order the right number of inserts to go in those cartons.

“This could be a real game changer for not only our farm, but for the industry.”

And if it does change the game, it is likely that technology will shake up more than just mango picking up north.

Fassifern Valley grower Jodie Moore said she couldn’t see robotic picking technology applying to hay and grain growers like her, but thought automation was the future of farming.

“Technology is gonna be a positive, with the way the world is at the moment,” she said.

“It’s hard to find labour, and things will start to go that way I suppose.”

The 27-year-old said she had seen driverless tractors rolled out overseas.

“They’re gonna come to Australia soon,” she predicted.

“It’s hard to say when, though, not for a few years yet.”

Ms Moore said she and her father had adopted GPS in their tractors and used a pivot irrigator which could be switched on using their mobile phones.

The Kalbar grower said her crop of lucerne, Rhodes grass and mung beans were flourishing in the rain, and she was upbeat about a career in agriculture.

“There’s definitely a future in farming,” she said.

It’s just that that future may involve fewer people, and more robots.