The dwindling supply of workers has long been on the horizon, but there's a new urgency for farmers to shift to machines to harvest crops around the region and state.
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Olives await harvesting at Cortopassi Farms in Lodi. A harvesting machine can collect the olives from an entire acre of trees in just one hour.
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Olives ride on a conveyor belt from a harvesting machine to a collection bin at Cortopassi Farms in Lodi. The machines greatly improve efficiency in the fields during harvest time, but the cost of the equipment can be daunting for growers.
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A tractor pulls a bin being fed by an olive-harvesting machine at Cortopassi Farms in Lodi. Over the past decade, new olive growers and olive oil producers have been planting olives in super high-density grids and switching from hand labor to mechanized labor. Farmers say a shortage of laborers is worsening.
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Olives ride on a conveyor belt from a harvesting machine to a collection bin at Cortopassi Farms in Lodi. The machines greatly improve efficiency in the fields during harvest time, but the cost of the equipment can be daunting for growers.
