FruitsAbout 100 acres of mixed fruit orchards in Rowangchhari, Bandarban, have no irrigation; water hauled by labourers from a stream 1.5 km away costs about Tk 2 a litre. The agriculture department is planning solar-powered pumps.
AgrotechThe Viewer uses two RGB cameras with flashing LEDs to count buds, flowers and fruit on trees up to 5 metres tall, predicting yield two to three months before harvest and steering variable-rate spraying.
FruitsOf the 110 hectares of lemon in Saturia, Manikganj, this season, 90 are in Boiltola village, where lemon growing that began on sugarcane land about 30 years ago is now nearly every farmer's first choice.
AgrotechThe next phase adds autonomous spraying, mowing and under-tree cultivation on Kubota's low-profile M5L diesel tractor for orchard and nut growers.
FruitsAt the district's biggest dragon fruit orchard, in Bajitpur, Rajbari Sadar, each plant has borne 10-12 kg; at the peak of the season about 2,000 kg are picked daily and sold wholesale at Tk 150 a kilogram.
AgrotechSTEYR has launched the Spezial F CVT, a 100 to 120 hp range of compact tractors for orchards, hop gardens and other perennial crops that can carry auto-guidance, automated headland turns and a digital farm management link.
AgrotechGUSS Automation, a John Deere subsidiary, is fitting Ouster colour lidar to its driverless orchard sprayers so they can hold their rows under tree canopies where satellite signals fail, with one person supervising up to eight machines.
FruitsOnly about 300 acres of quince are grown commercially in the US, but Pacific Northwest growers, cider makers and the USDA's quince collection see a niche market growing, Capital Press reports ahead of Portland's third Quince Fest.
AgrotechResearchers at Chonnam National University in South Korea built an AI system that matches drone imagery with ground-robot LiDAR to build multilayer digital orchard models, locating robots within a few centimetres.
AgrotechPeter Baars mows his apple and pear orchards with an autonomous Fendt and maps every tree with a roof camera, but says full trust needs tractor and implement to communicate and stop themselves.
AgrotechThe Center of Excellence for Orchard Robotics brings seven universities, Fresh Fruit Robotics and Washington Fruit and Produce Co together on machines for apple and cherry orchards, where labour has climbed from 45 to over 60 percent of costs.
Orchard Robotics founder Charlie Wu says his tractor-mounted AI camera, which counts and sizes fruit tree by tree, pays back three to ten times in its first year through labour and input savings, and the company is expanding from apples into a dozen other crops.
