Improve Competitiveness of Specialty Crop Production through a New Product Quality Verification Method

In order for America to remain competitive in the world market in agriculture production and processing it must continue to innovate and create technologies that decrease the cost of food production. If America can do so, it maintains the ability to produce high quality products. Sorting and grading is an expensive and time consuming part of agriculture production and decreasing its cost through technology will aid in making America competitive on the world market.In order to make the most impact, technology needs to be widely available to specialty crops and not only large markets with access to large sums of capital. Our phase II research improves the functionality of an existing produce grading and sorting mechanical system. Our system helps aid farmers and agricultural processing companies improve the overall quality of their processing by increasing the accuracy of their sorting and grading process. We attach cameras to existing mechanical carrier systems, and the cameras feed data to computers. The computers than feed quality information back to the mechanical system, allowing the crop to be sorted based on quality, size, and other characteristics. This automated process allows them to decrease their labor costs, and improve time to markets. Thus allowing them to be more competitive, creating prosperity in rural communities.