Can robots solve farmers' difficulties in recruiting fruit pickers?

Duncan Robinson, chief executive of Dogtooth technologies discusses how fruit picking robots could help ease production problems for farmers in Kent

Transcript

00:00The key challenge from the customer perspective is to recruit enough high quality and experienced

00:22picking labour. Increasingly it's difficult to persuade young people to take temporary

00:28jobs picking fruit here in the UK and it's also difficult to find sufficiently skilled

00:35labour. Picking is not low skilled work, it needs a lot of expertise and practice.

00:41And so we think it's inevitable that robotic automation will help to fill the gap left by

00:48a shrinking workforce. We've built several generations of picking robots, our fifth

00:55generation robot is increasingly able to make a meaningful difference to the harvest requirements

01:02on the farm. It's very productive, capable of picking broadly as much fruit during the

01:08course of the day as a person.

01:25you