Fruitometry has concluded our second season of commercial Digital Crop Estimation (DCE) for kiwifruit in New Zealand. We’ve scanned over two thousand hectares and nearly five hundred domestic kiwifruit orchards.
Kiwifruit growers and orchard managers face many challenges. One of the top challenges is optimising thinning labour. Fruitometry density reports show where your field labour yields the greatest return. With field labour surpassing NZ$10k per hectare, Fruitometry Reports enable you to manage thinning accurately, economically, and objectively. Your cost can be recouped with 10% improvement in labour productivity by measuring 100% of your orchard.
Post-harvest operators also face many challenges. One of the top challenges is harvest forecasting. Estimating the tray size profile for every maturity area is non-trivial: every fruit must be digitally analysed to achieve an accurate answer. For kiwifruit the ultimate ground truth is Class 1 Trays packed. No company in New Zealand offers commercial fruit harvest forecasts – yet.
Below is a sneak peek at Fruitometry’s upcoming Fruit Size / Harvest Forecast feature. The Fruit Density and Fruit Size heat maps below show the natural inverse correlation between density and size already intuitively known by horticulturalists and growers. Now Fruitometry can offer objective metrics for this size / density relation for every block on your orchard.
(A note on the fruit density heat map below – our pre-harvest estimate for this particular orchard was within 1 fruit per square metre of the orchard’s Class 1 fruit packed as reported by the packhouse.)
