2025, Volume 22, Paper 2
ISSN: 1449-7875
Farm Benefit: Cost Analysis of a Traceability-enhanced Hand-held Fruit Quality Sensor
Kerry Stott – Agriculture Victoria
Mark O’Connell – Agriculture Victoria
Stephen Williams – Agriculture Victoria
Arbind Agrahari Baniya – Agriculture Victoria
Kieran Murphy – Agriculture Victoria
Abstract
Agriculture Victoria Research has conducted several traceability pilots with industry partners to address a major impediment to the adoption of digital traceability in agriculture: i.e., the inability of isolated systems to interact and ‘talk’ with each other. One pilot was a collaboration with Rubens Technologies, who market a hand-held fluorescence-reflectance sensor and analytics for the non-destructive measurement of internal quality in pome and stone fruit. The Rubens pilot demonstrated how traceability functionalities could be retrofitted into the sensor’s associated mobile application and application programming interface services. Along with applying unique identifiers to carriers (tags) placed on orchard features and objects (trees, bins), these changes enabled the seamless ingestion of contextual information critical for early supply chain management into the orchard’s data ecosystem. Ex ante benefit: cost analysis suggests that practice changes made possible by the adoption of the modified Rubens product are likely to add to an orchardist’s wealth. Risks and returns were examined for two decision-making processes for a hypothetical 2-ha block of Royal Gala apples: (1) harvest timing, and (2) post-harvest storage. Extra costs were weighed up against ongoing annual benefits. For both decisions, benefits included labour savings from a more streamlined testing and data collection process. Considering only the labour savings, the combined net present value (NPV) estimated over 5 years with a 7 per cent p.a. real discount rate was $1,479/block. For the second decision, a higher crop value was also possible by increasing the sample size on which the storage decision was based. In this case, estimation of benefits required the use of Monte Carlo simulation technology, and the combined NPV rose to an average of $16,697/block. This figure masks a modest 25 per cent probability that benefits would exceed the costs. Annualised, the NPV with the larger sample size averaged $2,039/ha p.a., which exceeds the gross margin estimated from recent industry data of $1,942/ha. This seemingly large net benefit is equivalent to a modest 3 percentage point increase in Class 1 pack-out from the industry average to the industry maximum of 79 per cent. These comparisons confirm the importance of growers minimising downside marketing/price risk by targeting fruit quality at harvest and at the earliest stages of the supply chain.
Key words: fruit quality measurement, digital traceability, sensor, harvest, risk and return.
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