"Tomatoes typically bear fruit in clusters, requiring robots to pick the ripe ones while leaving the rest on the vine, demanding advanced decision-making and control capabilities."

At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)?

This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" -- I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for.

Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort of thing is already in place.

Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like in the future?

> I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for.

> Is this already being done?

This is, indeed, already something that is done. As I understand it, for tomatoes it's typically for canning varieties, but they're called determinate cultivars[1]. Even with those, I know in processing you still have to discard the occasional fruit that isn't ripe.

I imagine this kind of technological solution would also be more useful when picking tomatoes for use as the fresh fruit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinate_cultivar

The way greenhouse tomatoes are grown is already pretty robot friendly.

See below for a couple examples:

https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-...

https://tta-iso.com/innovations/harvai

They are doing this now actually for plant breeding! "Engineering crop flower morphology facilitates robotization of cross-pollination and speed breeding" covers one example by breeding flowers to be more easily pickable by robotics.

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00840-2

It is done for entire species.

There is plenty of fruits (Pawpaw, loquat, soursop come to mind) that are really not grown at-scale commercially in the US due to spoilage, easy to bruise, or other similar issues.

If you like interesting fruit, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/

for many fruits you will have never seen before.

They're called "processing tomatoes" and it's a very interesting crop and industry. Bred for a narrow ripening window, to be machine harvestable, and shippable in massive bulk.

https://ctga.org/tomato-facts/

Will they manage to make mass produced tomatoes when worse than they are now? Seriously they're so bad, they're not even worth purchasing in my opinion.

We already did this for durability, resulting in tomatoes that didn't taste of very much.

Now, the supermarkets that sold those have solved it by breeding ones that are incredibly sweet.

"At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability"

This has been happening for hundreds of years already with every food crop.

Keeping them on the vine is far better for the consumer, who can have a range of tomatoes that ripen as you eat them.