PARRISH, FL - Spurred by a tight labor market, Jones Potato Farm introduced the advanced VERYX® B175 digital sorter to automate its bulk product inspection. Since its installation in 2020, it has helped reduce manual labor while protecting quality and supply.
“The labor shortage is a major concern for all agricultural operations. It’s become very difficult and expensive to recruit and retain 20 reliable workers to manually inspect our green beans, especially during our peak season when we often operate seven days a week,” said Alan Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer. “While we’ll always have a place for good employees here in our facility, it’s nice to be able to take some pressure off our people. VERYX is a highly effective sorter that improves our operating efficiencies.”
VERYX is Key Technology’s most advanced optical sorter, with the B175 being the highest capacity model, a release explained. The machine can process up to 6.8 metric tons of green beans per hour on its 1,750-millimeter-wide inspection zone. That amounts to more than 250,000 bushels of green beans every year.
Equipped with cameras and laser sensors, the VERYX B175 can recognize every object's color, size, shape, and structural properties. VERYX also identifies and ejects all types of foreign matter, including insects, animal parts, paperboard, wood, rocks, plastics, and glass, as well as extraneous vegetative matter (EVM), such as weeds and other plant material, from the product stream.
“Green beans can present a wide variety of different defects, depending on the growing environment. Here in Florida, we grow green beans in light sand, so wind damage and tip rot are common issues. We like that our VERYX can be programmed to focus on the specific defects found in our region,” said Ishmael Hernandez, Production and Farm Manager at Jones Potato Farm. “And it’s easy to fine-tune the settings, so we remove exactly what we want and nothing more. It’s totally customizable.”
To read more about this automated system and its impacts on Jones Potato Farm, click here.
As more companies across fresh produce introduce innovative means to combat challenges, stay tuned to AndNowUKnow for details.
