Driverless tractors and AI: WA's biggest blueberry farm bets on robots

Western Berry, Western Australia's biggest blueberry grower, is betting on robots to keep the fruit coming. The farm sits 100 kilometres north of Perth and spreads across 120 hectares. This season it will send just under 1,500 tonnes of blueberries to supermarkets in Australia and Asia, and the family that owns it wants to triple that output in the coming years.

Operations manager Marek Kwiecien-Fisher says the company is trialling autonomous tech as much as it can. Driverless, self-navigating tractors handle foliar spraying, run laser-guided 'green on brown' weed control and haul berries from the field to the pack house. The machines use GPS mapping, sensors and cameras to follow set routes and can be driven remotely. Kwiecien-Fisher calls them an expensive outlay and time-consuming to learn, but he's convinced they have a firm future on the farm.

Inside the pack house, autonomy is already doing the heavy lifting: photographic packing, grading and punnetising. Each berry gets photographed six to nine times before it lands in a punnet, and Kwiecien-Fisher says the data keeps paying off — even information they didn't set out to collect shows them how to operate next year and where to fill gaps in production, supply or customer requirements.

Two harvesters are on the property, the newest battery-operated, solar-powered and steered by remote control, collecting fruit and stacking its own trays. A machine can pull up to 6 tonnes of blueberries a day at roughly 50 cents a kilogram, against about $6 a kilogram for hand picking. Kwiecien-Fisher wants AI learning to eventually make the harvester autonomous — press a button, and it drives itself down the row.

Further out, he's eyeing humanoid robots taught by AI models to prune, plus autonomous mowing, flower counts and crop-health cameras that spot poor irrigation. Pruning, he says, sets how much fruit gets picked the following year, making it a huge indicator for forecasting volumes. The shift also opens a new employment lane: computer science specialists and people who know how to run AI and the machines.

Labour isn't going anywhere yet. Western Berry employs more than 200 pickers, one of the largest workforces in the region, and Kwiecien-Fisher says at most half the crop will ever be machine harvested. The push comes as Australian food producers have flagged slower federal visa processing and caps on working holiday makers. It's a long way from the farm's start: Derek Fisher and his wife Barbara bought a former ostrich property nearly 30 years ago, planted olives in 2001, then switched course after a one-hectare blueberry trial worked. Their sons Adam, Marek and Tom now run supply chain and packing, new farm construction, and operations respectively, and a 2021 deal with United Exports and Oz Varieties gave them access to OZblu blueberry genetics.