Originally Posted by Joshuatree
There is a large growing demand for kiwifruit esp from Asia atm bull.
Jobs will be displaced for sure but there will still need to be pickers to clean up after the bots and to pick the side skirts too for a while anyway. And the pruning and tying down is a high labour person job. still atp.
I used to pick way back to boost my coffers. Was in the "A" team ,fastest and most efficient; up to 8 bins or more each day; we had it good and were slightly favoured by the organisers. But then one day a picking gang entered the far side of the large block we were picking(we could hear the 3 bin tractor start up move 30 metres ,stop then repeat.) Alarmingly the sound moved ahead of us and we could almost hear a rising sound of thousands of little snapping pops as kiwifruit were pulled off the vine with an accompanied noisy babble.
The first Indian workers had arrived. We tried to best them and only occasionally matched them, maybe our fruit quality had less bruising.
Yeh Josh, we had Indian pickers and the best one picked 16 BINS per day , but on the whole they picked 12-14 bins, fantastic pickers/workers.
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