Salico has partnered with Olakai Hawaii to help develop machinery to improve the efficiency of their sea asparagus farm. More specifically, we plan to build a robot harvester which can traverse the farm autonomously.
Olakai farm in Oahu, Hawaii.
We expect this to be a complex project, and are currently discussing different mechanisms to harvest the crops, prioritizing quality of the picked produce, and the health of the plant. Critically, traditional cutting-style harvesters such as combines cannot be used due to their cutting motions, which can cause too much or too little of the plant to be harvested, and hinder the future growth of the plant. Therefore, we are working to develop a mechanism that mimics the manual human harvesting method, which involves pulling off only the newly grown tips of the plants instead of cutting.
One of the potential harvesting mechanisms under discussion.