Award-winning Victorian apple grower Brad Fankhauser is constantly looking to innovate, with several leaps of faith leading to significant efficiency gains
As the current generation of a family farm which has always looked to innovate, Brad Fankhauser has his finger on the pulse of agtech opportunities.
Brad is the general manager and director of Fankhauser Apples, located in Victoria’s Gippsland region, which grows about 2,000 tonnes of apples each year.
The family has been apple growers for about 140 years and has spent more than 40 years at its current location in Drouin.
Brad is the fifth generation to be involved and works alongside his parents and wife Darlene on the farm, with Brad’s two oldest children now involved too – marking the sixth generation of Fankhausers to grow apples.
Knowledge has naturally been passed down the generations, as has an ingrained desire to innovate with technology and farming methods.
“My grandfather was one of the early adopters of controlled atmosphere storage and cool stores,” Brad says.
“I think that’s followed through, my dad also did several things a bit ahead of the average industry’s time, such as installing hail netting, and we’re just following suit.”
The list of innovative measures and technologies adopted, most of which have been proactively instigated by Brad, demonstrates what can be achieved by having a forward-thinking approach.
It has also been recognised by industry, with Brad being named the Apple and Pear Australia Limited grower of the year in 2015, and the family also featuring in a television commercial in 2012 to promote the apple sector.
This adoption of new technologies is not about winning awards though, with many of them proving to be gamechangers in terms of boosting productivity on the farm.
Top pick
When asked which initiative had been the most impactful, Brad says the two harvest assistance machines he imported from Italy.
He first discovered them at Interpoma, a pome fruit-focused event in Italy which he attended about eight years ago.
These machines, manufactured by a company called Zucal, stood out as being the best and he imported two – which he believes are the only ones in Australia.
“They’re a little bit different to your normal harvest machines in they’ve got extra sets of belts that wrap around each individual picker,” he says.
“Their productivity is phenomenal when you start using the machines and it’s probably one of the best bits of equipment we’ve bought.
“We’ve actually decreased our harvest costs substantially and increased productivity, and I’m pretty sure it’s just for that one reason.”
Brad’s harvest platform offers the ability for up to eight people to work at once and features conveyor belts, including the extra set around each individual picker, which means they do not even need to twist their body.
LED lights enable operations to also occur during the night and away from the heat of the day.
While involving a significant initial outlay, the benefits to both productivity and safety have been enormous.
“For as long as we’ve been growing fruit, people have been climbing up picking ladders and using canvas bags, or even some of the newer softer synthetic material made bags,” Brad says.
“There’s a lot of effort that goes into climbing a ladder, and I think we worked out that we pretty much pick every tree on our farm twice.
“We have to pick all our apples, so we go through and get probably 50 or 60 per cent of fruit in the first pass and then a week or 10 days later we come through and clean up again.”
Brad had a ‘penny drop’ moment of realising that an alternative to this setup would not only improve safety and reduce fatigue in workers, but make the entire process significantly more efficient.
“We were essentially climbing every tree twice and we have around 3,000 trees a hectare,” he says.
“If you think about climbing every tree twice, it’s about 1.8m or 2m tall on a ladder, then you’re climbing about 6,000 vertical metres of height, so paying people to do that seemed absolutely ludicrous.
“You watch your workers work and the penny drops at some point and you go ‘I’m paying these people to climb Mount Everest every two hectares’ and that just doesn’t make any logical sense – you ask ‘why are we doing this’?
“It was a no brainer for us to go into machinery that is set up for the orchard, plus the orchard had to be set up for it, so to go down that path has been really successful.”
Testing site
Another innovation which Fankhauser Apples has been involved in, and which Farms & Farm Machinery previously reported on, was a Monash University-led trial of ‘cobots’ that were designed to automate intensive tasks such as picking fruit.
Fankhauser Apples was the orchard used to trial these cobots in real-world conditions, with Brad donating about 15m of one row so this technology could be tested.
“I was happy to donate that to Monash Uni it and if there’s a benefit for us long term down the track, then I’m more than happy to work with someone to try and find solutions,” he says.
“I think their drive came from seeing the trouble everyone was having with sourcing labour and especially in the last few years it’s getting harder and harder.
“With apples being one of the harder fruits to pick, I think they thought if they can master apples, they could just about master anything.
“It’s only early stages yet and they really haven’t been through picking what you would call a commercial quantity at this point. They’re still a little way off that but they’re getting closer.”
Brad is engaged with the concept of robotic harvesting, not just through the Monash University trial but globally.
He is excited about the improvements in this space and the way automated harvesting is progressing but believes setting the targets lower than what many of the tech companies are aiming for would still constitute success for farmers like him.
“Everyone is trying to get to 80, 90 or 100 per cent of the crop picked, but the reality is that they can’t get robots to mimic a human hand and wrist movement yet,” he says.
“I think it will be a little while before we get there, so I’d be setting my target a little bit lower and saying ‘we can get 60 per cent of your fruit’, then essentially you only need about half the staff you’ve got now, which would be a fantastic result.
“As a grower, we think we have to accept that it’s near impossible to get all of it, but if we can reduce our labour needs by 50 per cent, we’re a lot better off.”
Covering all bases
The harvest machines and testing robotic technology are two significant examples of what is happening at Fankhauser Apples, but that is far from the limit.
The Fankhausers have also invested in solar panels to cover the coolstore roof, which not only reduces the overall carbon footprint but also brings Fankhauser Apples close to being self-sufficient in electricity consumption.
The outlay was about $120,000 for the solar panels, Brad estimates, but it has trimmed about three-quarters of the annual power bill – even with electricity costs rising – and this initial outlay will soon be covered.
Fankhauser Apples also has its own weather station, which was installed as a means of tackling the black spot fungus which Brad says can take two or three years to properly clean out of the orchard if a bad outbreak gets into the crop.
The weather station is linked to a European-developed black spot modelling and forecasting software system which gives Brad a wealth of valuable data.
“In Gippsland we’re probably the hotspot capital of Australia, if not the world,” he says.
“Every morning when I wake up, especially during spring time, my go-to is our weather station and the forecast for fungus for the next seven to 10 days.
“You can plan around it and as you spray your chemicals the system has got the capacity to estimate what percentage of chemical is left on the tree and whether you need to reapply or if it’s going to have sufficient coverage.
“That kind of data is pretty valuable to us.”
Brad also cuts grass at the same time as spraying the orchard, thanks to the Fendt tractors which he has been a long-term fan of, and this is another tactic he believes is not common on Australian orchards.
“That’s another major labour saver, because at the moment we’re spraying every week for fungus and the last thing you want to do is finish spraying and then start mowing,” he says.
“It’s a bit of a downer spending three days in a row just going around your orchard, so if I can do the two jobs at once then I’m miles in front.”
As a large-scale grower with no plans of slowing down any time soon, it is clear why Fankhauser Apples is constantly looking for any long-term efficiency gain – whether these are big or small.
Having already experienced benefits by getting the jump on new technology, Brad is excited by what is ahead.
“It seems strange that Australia has the highest wage rates in the world, yet in our industry we’re very slow to take up mechanisation and automation that can assist us,” he says.
“All through our history, our family has been fairly well at the forefront of most things.
“As a rule, I think it’s just in your nature to try and do better.”