Mechanization Efforts in Fruit Tree Pruning and Thinning

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.