By Yoke Har Lee
Californian orange-growers now have a solution for salvaging their frost-bitten crops -- an innovative kiwifruit grading machine.
Onehunga-based company Horticultural Automation's fruit-sorting machine recently provided a way for Golden Valley Citrus of the United States to sort out what it could still sell after frost affected its orange harvest.
Horticultural Automation founder Hamish Kennedy said: "They heard about us and bought a machine because of a serious four-day frost which went through the citrus belt of California. They paid to have the 10,000-tonne machine flown in a 747 plane to California."
Although there are plenty of weighting and sorting machines available on the world market, Horticultural Automation's is the only one able to solve the problem of picking out what can be used after a crop has been ravaged by frost. It measures the density of the fruit.
"If a crop is frosted, the cells in the fruit break and they dry out. There are varying degrees of dryness depending on which tree the fruit is on, the height, and a whole lot of other combinations," Mr Kennedy said.
"The degree of damage varies from tree to tree. Half the fruit could be good, the other half bad. If the damage is internal, sorters can't tell visually."
Mr Kennedy's sorting machines are able to sort the fruit according to the colour, measure the weight and volume to get the density.
Based on a benchmark of what is an acceptable density, a fruit is deemed good or bad, he said.
The machine sold to the US company fetched around $500,000. Horticultural Automation is now convinced other US citrus-growers will be eyeing the machine.
In another example, an Australian company who sold a crop into the US, had to ship its fruit to where one of Horticultural Automation's machines was to sort out its shipment. This helped save half of the crop.
Mr Kennedy started his company 15 years ago, fresh from university, with a masters in electrical engineering. He was then scouting to start a business that would utilise his electronics knowledge.
Because the company's development coincided with the kiwifruit boom of the mid-1980s, Mr Kennedy decided to go into business building weighing machines for that industry.
From a small start, Horticultural Automation has developed to be in the forefront of fruit-sorting machines. Some 80 per cent of its machines are sold overseas and the company's turnover exceeds $10 million a year.
Incorporating electronics technology, optics and scanning technology along with software knowledge, the machine uses a conveyor belt system to rotate, weigh and tip the fruit at a correct point and with sufficient speed. The conveyor belt must be accelerated and decelerated with precise timing.
Each lane of conveyor can process 12 pieces of fruit per second. A 12-lane conveyor, for instance, can process 140-odd fruit a second.
The company is now toying with new breakthrough technology which Mr Kennedy said will change the way fruit is sorted by growers and packers.
Still under development, it will propel the company into exceeding its traditional annual growth rate of around 30 per cent of the last four years.
It is also custom-building onion and potato-sorting machines.
Funding from Technology New Zealand has helped the company develop two separate, but directly connected, grading systems. The first was an external defect grader to increase consistency; the second was a colour sorting system used to add value to packaging for niche markets.
"When I started out, there were a few factors that made it [the business] worth choosing. I looked around at a few other things in the electronics area but this one stood out as a high growth potential. The international potential came later."
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