HOOD RIVER, Ore. — With pear harvest in full swing across the Hood River Valley, activity was buzzing on a mid-September morning inside the noisy packing house at Diamond Fruit Growers, one of the country’s oldest agricultural cooperatives.

Forklifts carried 1,100-pound bins of freshly picked Anjou pears from nearby orchards into the cavernous facility, where they were stacked next to a massive robotic conveyor system specifically designed to sort the bright green fruit by size and grade.

Bob Wymore, president and CEO of the co-op, watched from a platform overlooking the setup as hundreds of pears zipped past in a matter of minutes.

“If we hadn’t done this, I don’t know that we could have survived,” Wymore said of installing the $12 million optical sorter in 2018, the first of its kind to be designed for pears.

A deepening labor shortage is prompting the Northwest pear industry to increase automation, replacing jobs previously done by humans with new technology that can almost double production with a fraction of the workforce.

This year’s pear crop is expected to be about average, estimated at 15.2 million, 44-pound boxes, according to the Pear Bureau Northwest. That is up 8% over 2022, but down slightly compared to the five-year average.

“Quality looks good,” Wymore said. “We should be in for a good season this year, if the marketing goes well.”

Signature crop

Oregon and Washington account for nearly 90% of all pears grown in the U.S., and no area produces more than Hood River.

Diamond Fruit Growers was founded here in 1913. Members initially grew and shipped apples before a devastating freeze in 1919 killed many of the region’s apple trees, with record temperatures as low as minus 27 degrees Fahrenheit.

Growers largely replaced apples with pears, and today Hood River County has more than 12,000 acres of pear orchards.

The packing house where Diamond boxes and stores fresh pears was built in 1970. Wymore describes it as a “pre-size” facility, meaning the fruit is sorted by size and grade as soon as it arrives. Then it is kept in cold storage until it is made ready for customer orders.

Wymore said the plant typically packs between 2 million and 2.1 million boxes of pears every year.

Because the Hood River Valley is such a good place to grow pears, Wymore said their members are able to produce a range of signature varieties, such as Anjou, Bartlett, Bosc, Red Anjou, Comice, Forelle, Seckel and Starkrimson.

“It’s just a good climate for growing pears,” he said. “It’s not too hot, not too cold.”

Shrinking workforce

In the past, Wymore said it took about 48 workers per shift to pre-sort pears by hand during harvest. With two shifts each day, that adds up to 96 people.

Thanks to automation, it now requires only six workers on the optical sorter. Wymore said the move to high-tech was necessary due to a shortage of available labor.

“Our workforce that we have currently is aging and not being replaced,” he said. “Diamond’s board has been very supportive of the strategy that we have to modernize and mechanize the processes. They recognize that, in order for us to be relevant, we’re going to have to automate.”

The problem was the technology simply didn’t exist for pears. Because the fruit is not perfectly round, it doesn’t roll as easily along conveyors without scuffing.

Pear skin is particularly sensitive, Wymore said. Unlike apples or cherries, pears can easily suffer nicks and marks that turn the skin black if handled carelessly.

“Obviously, consumers buy with their eyes,” Wymore said. “They don’t want damaged fruit.”

The co-op reached out to Unitec, an Italian company that manufactures sorting equipment for fruits and vegetables, to come up with a solution. Together, they spent five years developing an optical sorter to fit the unique shape of pears.

‘Picture’ perfect

Installed in 2018, the system is divided into three lanes and spans about 300 feet across the spacious concrete warehouse.

Robotic arms lift bins of pears delivered from orchards and unload them into a cleansing water bath, starting the process. From there, pears ride continuously along a conveyor past two workers per lane who cull severely damaged fruit and leafy debris.

After getting dried and sprayed with a fungicide to prevent mold while in storage, the pears are ready for their close-up. They pass beneath large boxes fitted with multiple flashing cameras, snapping 10-20 pictures of each pear at different angles.

The conveyor then gently flips each piece of fruit — riding snug and secure in individual pear-shaped rubber cups to avoid marking — and enters a second camera box, providing a full 360-degree view of every single pear.

Computers determine the size and grade of the fruit, which is separated and placed back into bins. The bins are then kept in airtight rooms where the atmosphere can be controlled by infusing nitrogen gas to reduce oxygen levels. This keeps the pears fresh for months before they are sold.

Wymore said he expects the machinery pioneered at Diamond will soon become the industry standard. The co-op used to sort about 400 bins per shift under the watch of human eyes. Now they can sort 700 bins with better consistency, Wymore said.

“Cameras are cameras. You tell them what to do, and they do it,” he said. “You try to train (people) to grade pears, but everyone has a different perception of what’s good and bad.”

Not every process in the packing house is mechanized. The actual boxing of pears is still done by hand, with workers receiving piece-rate pay.

But Wymore said that could change as technology continues to advance.

“We’re going to see more and more automated processes, whether it’s bagging or packing,” he said. “That’s just the future.”

Reconfiguring orchards

Changes are also being made in the valley’s orchards, as some progressive-minded farmers reconsider how they plant and space their trees.

Herbie Annala, 37, is a fourth-generation grower and Diamond member. His family’s 115-year-old farm has about 40 acres of pears.

In recent years, Annala has adopted a higher density of trees in his orchard blocks, taking rows that were spaced 24 feet apart and 12 to 14 feet between trees, and replanting them into 12-foot rows with 5 feet between trees.

The adjustment comes with several benefits, Annala said. By being closer together, the trees grow smaller and are easier to manage. Crews can do spraying, pruning and picking faster than before, the fruit is more uniform, and it makes better use of the space.

“We’re going from fewer than 200 trees per acre up to 726 trees per acre,” he said. “Everything is more efficient.”

Finding new acreage to expand farms is extremely difficult around Hood River, Annala said, as agriculture butts up against urban growth.

Jennifer Euwer, of Valley Crest Orchards near Parkdale, Ore., in the upper Hood River Valley, said she is increasing her tree density, too. Greater efficiency, Euwer said, means less money spent on crop inputs and labor, which she estimated have increased about 30%.

“As our margins have shrunk, we need to produce more per acre and have more acres just to try to stay even,” Euwer said.

Condensed season

A year ago, Mid-Columbia growers were challenged by an untimely snowstorm that blanketed orchards shortly after trees had blossomed. The cold and snow essentially froze bee activity, resulting in less pollination and, therefore, less fruit.

This year, Mother Nature flip-flopped. Temperatures spiked into the 90s after bloom in April, which Annala said he suspects might have dried out pollen or made some flowers unviable. The result is the same — a lighter crop for some varieties, particularly Bartletts.

“You just want the flower to have the best chance possible to produce a piece of fruit,” he said. “If it gets too hot, pollen can dry out, flowers can become unviable, and all of a sudden what looks like is going to be a nice crop set, once you actually set fruit, it seems like things just disappeared off the tree.”

Torey Schmidt, the lead field manager for Diamond, said this year was one of the shortest growing seasons on record for Bartlett. Typically, growers like to see 120 growing days for their fruit to bulk in size. This year, however, they saw just 103 days.

The early heat, Schmidt said, was a culprit.

Annala called it one of the most challenging years he’s ever had for Bartlett, given the condensed season.

“That little bit of (extra) time can make the difference between making a fresh pack grade or a canner grade, which is a significant price difference,” he said.

Southern Oregon

Meanwhile, 330 miles away in Medford, Ore., pear growers are just happy to have a crop in 2023.

Medford is one of four pear-growing regions tracked by the Pear Bureau Northwest, along with the Mid-Columbia (including Hood River), and Wenatchee and Yakima in Washington.

Mike Naumes, president and CEO of Naumes Inc., which grows 1,100 acres of pears in the Rogue Valley, said last year they harvested virtually no crop due to a combination of drought, water shortages and inclement weather.

Without enough stored water available for irrigation, fruit from some Naumes orchards came in way too small to sell, in some cases no larger than golf balls. A disastrous hailstorm also hammered about 600 acres of orchards on the west side of the valley, Naumes said, damaging trees and wiping out the crop there.

A much wetter winter brought needed relief to the valley this year, refilling key reservoirs in the Talent Irrigation District, which supplies him and other growers with water.

Apart from one hot spell over the summer, Naumes said the season has gone smoothly. He was expecting rain to fall on Sept. 25, but figured it would only slightly delay picking.

“We’re quite frankly really happy to have a crop this year,” he said. “We’re just fortunate the weather’s cooperated this time around.”