Mechanization Efforts in Fruit Tree Pruning and Thinning

Manoj Karkee, Stavros Vougioukas, Stephen Devadoss and Santosh Bhusal

Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues, 2025, vol. 40, issue 2

Abstract: Farm labor shortages and increasing costs represent significant challenges to specialty crop production. Fruit production in particular involves numerous laborintensive tasks that must be carried out within a limited time. Fruit growers rely heavily on a diminishing workforce of migrant workers and a smaller number of temporary, H-2A guest workers (Devadoss and Luckstead, 2008; Devadoss and Luckstead, 2018; Devadoss and Luckstead, 2019). However, bureaucracy, unnecessary delays, and higher costs make it difficult for farmers to rely on the H-2A program (Luckstead and Devadoss, 2019; Devadoss, 2021). As a result, fruit growers are in dire need of labor-saving technologies to mechanize labor-intensive operations such as pruning, thinning, and harvesting.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaeach:356843

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.356843

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