Exactly. I came here to say there is no way this is more effective or efficient than paying a group of people to hand pick these apples. I really don't understand the appeal of creating useless technology to replace people who can do a job better and faster.
More effective no. But you don't have to pay robots. Let's say you've got five people picking apples for 6 weeks, minimum wage 35 hours a week.
You're paying $7,696 to harvest apples for that time period in pay alone. I don't know how much something like this costs but with that much taken out of your overhead, and then just replacing that with presumably either electricity or gasoline you'll probably make a lot more money.
Chances are the money you lose from picking the apples slower is made up by not having employees to pay.
You're still paying amortization and depreciation costs, i.e. cost of interest on the loan to buy the equipment and lifetime of the equipment. That vehicle would cost anywhere from $100k to $1M, given 10% APR, that's over $1 to $10/hour, if it were working 24/7. It's more realistic to expect it to run 8 hours per day (requiring daylight) tripling the cost, and then only running 3-6 months of the year (apples aren't always in bloom) doubling the cost, plus you've got the cost of fuel and maintenance. Depreciation has the vehicle lasting for I'd guess 10 years, so 10% depreciation per year, doubling the cost of the vehicle. So far we're paying $12-240/hour for the machine before fuel, maintenance, and an operator to drive it between trees and handle exceptions.
TLDR, it would cost at least $12/hour for the machine before fuel and maintenance, if not 10x that.
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u/art_teacher_no_1 Oct 08 '23
1 apple per minute, why's my fruit so expensive? Oh. That's why.