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The berry of the future is fed a specialised diet and picked by a robot

22 Nov 2016

On a wall at the Watsonville, California, headquarters of Driscoll's Inc., the nearly $3 billion global berry brand, dozens of little green trucks move about on a large screen with a map of the US. It's a real-time representation of every truck on the road carrying the company's strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries to customers across the country, with data from each truck - the temperature inside the cargo hold, whether it's stuck in traffic, even whether its doors are open or closed.

The berry of the future is fed a specialised diet and picked by a robot

It's an impressive display of technology, but at Driscoll's, the map is old news, something to show visitors while they're killing time, waiting to sample the in-house chef's latest batch of gluten-free strawberry muffins.

If you want to see the latest high-tech innovations at Driscoll's, you have to head out to the fields.

"Our production system is evolving quite dramatically," said Soren Bjorn, executive vice president of Driscoll's of the Americas. It has to: The world, including California, is not generating more farmland - it's actually losing it, thanks to factors like population growth, pollution, and erosion. "We have to get more out of the limited resources that we have to serve a larger population," Bjorn explained.

Read the full article on Agri Africa.