Cal Poly’s Tenth Strawberry Center Field Day Presents Future Farming Innovations
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (KEYT) - Cal Poly hosted the tenth annual 'Strawberry Field Day' today.
The event gives us a peak at the farming industry’s future.
More than 600 farmers, researchers, students, industry leaders and engineers gathered at the college’s strawberry center adjacent to technology park.
“It didn't exist 12 years ago,” says Gerald Holmes, director of the Cal Poly Strawberry Center. “It was just an idea between Cal Poly and the Strawberry Commission. And now you see all of this activity, 650 people coming to a Field Day. It's beyond my wildest imagination, really.”
Small portions of the crowd rotate through different stations and watch presentations.
“It's to manage the traffic and make sure everybody has an opportunity to hear about everything the center is doing here on behalf of the industry,” says Chris Christian, vice president of market insights at the California Strawberry Commission.
To meet some of the agricultural industry's greatest challenges, such as labor shortages, water resource constraints, shifting climates, and increasing production costs, innovators literally have a field day presenting the latest developments.
“Anything we can do to make labor less burdensome, less onerous, we want to do that,” says Holmes. “And we're working on projects all the time that reduce the amount of manual labor that goes into strawberries.”
Officials say California produces 90 percent of the nation’s strawberries on 1 percent of the state’s farmland.
“And actually within about 2.5 hours driving distance of this campus, which makes our location really ideal for the work that we're doing,” says Holmes.
And they won’t be going anywhere, any time soon.
“California Strawberry Commission and Cal Poly are in the process of extending our annual agreement, funding the center for the next five, six years and on into the future,” says Christian.
Items featured today included electric tractors, an unmanned crop sprayer and an autonomous bug vacuum.
“It doesn’t harm the plants,” says Christian. “When it sucks the bad bugs off, there are rotating blades inside the unit that kill those bugs.”
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