When: NEXT WEEK - Tuesday through Thursday, October 22nd - 24th

Location: Yolo County Fairgrounds, Woodland, CA

Why: If you are at all interested in ag robotics or on-farm autonomous solutions this 3-day event includes demos, vendor booths, and panel discussions. Registration is FREE FOR GROWERS. There will be a processing tomato focused panel on Tuesday morning.

Excerpts From Patricia Lazicki's Preliminary Report:

Overview: Automated planters are able to plant more quickly with less labor than traditional planters. However, there is uncertainty whether there may be associated penalties in stand, yields, and fruit quality. This report gives preliminary results from a replicated field study. Our goal was to determine whether we could detect any consistent differences among planter types (a finger planter, a Ferrari FMAX carousel-type planter, and the Ferrari Futura and Agriplanter automated planters) for planting depth, skips, and fruit yields and quality.

Planting depth: In each of the three 2024 field trials, all planters had a similar planting depth (p>0.05). They also all had similar variability at all sites (p>0.05 for Levene’s test of homogeneity of variance). Figure 2 shows the combined data for all three sites in 2024.

Figure 2: Range, mean, and variability of planting depth in the 2024 field trials. Each black dot represents one plant measurement. 

Yield and quality: Neither total nor paid yield differed among the four planter types at any of the three sites (Figure 4). At the Winters site, there was a slight tendency for the Futura rows to have fewer greens (p=0.08); otherwise, there were no significant fruit quality differences among the planter types.

Figure 4: Average paid yields at the three field sites. 

Apply now to be the Assistant Professor of Plant Genetics and Director of the C. M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center!

This position will have significant support from the California processing tomato community and significant impact on global tomato production, for many years to come.

We build durable coalitions around the questions whose answers drive the long term success of the California processing tomato industry. Founded in 1968, the CTRI is a non-profit organization of processing tomato growers.