Technological innovation pushes agriculture toward a brave new world.

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After loading up with a full morning’s harvest, dozens of trucks from all around the Salinas Valley head straight for the gates of Tanimura and Antle’s massive cooler in Spreckels. One by one, they line up front-to-back along a long driveway that leads to the unloading dock. And there they sit, with their engines idling.

Under the company’s current system, trucks unload their produce according to their order of arrival. At around midday (rush hour for ag vehicles) that means drivers often wait for as many as six or seven other trucks to undergo the painstaking process of having their entire cargo inventoried with a hand-held bar code scanner before even a single box of produce can be unloaded.

Stefan van der Bijl, a senior software engineer for Tanimura and Antle, acknowledges that the company’s system could use some improvement, especially since trucks carrying produce harvested hours before must wait behind trucks that are carrying produce cut just a few minutes earlier.

And there is hope that this will change.

Tanimura and Antle researchers are betting that the needed change will happen with the help of RFID technology, one of the early 21st Century’s most ubiquitous and potentially versatile technical innovations.

Van der Bijl, a youthful looking man who speaks with a European accent (his parents are Dutch and French), explains how RFID computer chips will solve the truck-bottleneck problem. Eventually, he explains, each and every box of produce will carry a chip containing information such as what time the produce was picked and from which field it was harvested.

When the trucks come bouncing down the company’s driveway with their loads of RFID-tagged produce boxes, drivers will only have to steer their cargo past an array of RFID sensors. In a flash, a computer will log the truck’s entire inventory.

There is a further benefit: When those boxes come down the driveway to line up outside the company’s cooler, an RFID radio scanner will inform a technician which truck is carrying the “oldest” produce. That technician can then order that truck to the front of the line.

“To minimize that wait time is the most critical for us,” says van der Bijl on a morning walk into the Tanimura and Antle cooler. “Because as soon as you cut a head of lettuce, it starts dying.”

Van der Bijl continues to talk but is suddenly distracted as he spots a sticky label peeling off a black plastic box stuffed with freshly cut cauliflower. “Hold on one second,” he says as he leans over to snap a photo of the crooked and soggy label with his cell phone camera. “I have to make a record of that.”

The label that van der Bijl photographs looks like a normal sticker with a bar code. But it’s not. Embedded in it is the radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that’s as large as a postage stamp and just as thick.

The concept of RFID technology is simple. The technology behind it isn’t. When an RFID chip passes near a special magnetic reader, a current shoots through the chip that causes it to emit a pulsing signal identifying itself. “The beauty of RFID,” explains Mikelea Hailstone, Tanimura and Antle’s e-business manager, “is that it’s like a bar code that yells at you.”

RFID technology is already used in places like highway toll booths and in some hospitals, where newborns wear wristbands embedded with an RFID chip that triggers an alarm when it approaches a hospital exit. The potential uses for RFID technology today are wide open. Until recently, however, no one had ever used it to track produce in the US.

Van der Bijl, who is spearheading Tanimura and Antle’s RFID program, stuffs his cell phone back in his pocket and resumes his tour of the company’s Spreckels produce cooler, a refrigerator the size of a football field. Inside, dozens of fork lifts speed in every direction, lifting crates carrying thousands of pounds of produce onto 15-foot high shelves with awesome dexterity.

“Of all the produce you see in here,” says van der Bijl as he points to the endless rows of stacked crates, “more than 90 percent of it will be shipped out within 24 hours.”

For a company like Tanimura and Antle, the Salinas Valley’s largest produce harvester, it is critical to keep their produce constantly moving because the longer it takes the produce to get to store shelves, the higher the risk that it’ll be rejected because it has aged too much.

For this reason, when Wal-Mart, one of Tanimura and Antle’s largest contracts, asked its suppliers to start using RFID chips on its shipping crates in 2004, Tanimura and Antle jumped at the chance.

For Wal-Mart, the advantage of having its whole inventory tagged with RFID chips is that its technicians can eliminate shipment bottlenecks and avoid having too much or too little of a certain product. On a centralized computer, Wal-Mart employees can see a complete real-time overview of where its products are at any given point in time. These technicians can then place orders based on carefully calculated future needs.

For Tanimura and Antle, the goal is to track each and every box of vegetables it harvests from the moment its contents are picked until the moment the box is disassembled in the store. This way, company officials will be able to tighten up their distribution system and identify problem spots in their infrastructure.

“We saw this as critical for us,” says van der Bijl, who’s been working on the RFID project for two years. “[RFID] is where the future is and we want to be the first to implement this.”

Being first isn’t easy. Even though van der Bijl is working with cutting-edge computer technology, getting the RFID tags to actually work has entailed years of old-fashioned trial and error. He and his project coworkers have had to slog through muddy farm fields under pouring rain, experiment with endless rolls of duct tape and chicken wire, and endure a long search for something as mundane as the right type of sticker glue.

“Murphy’s law never failed us,” says van der Bijl, who designed Tanimura and Antle’s RFID computer tracking system. “When we were in Yuma in 2004 doing test runs, all of the field crews were crabby and full of mud from the rains, and here we were telling them that they had to pay more attention to how they stuck the RFID tags on the crates. It was a challenge.”

After all the trials, Tanimura and Antle completed its first shipment of RFID-tagged crates of lettuce and cauliflower to Wal-Mart in January of 2005.

The wrinkles in the system are still being ironed out, but its essential components are already in place. It all begins in the fields. As boxes of produce are filled by farmworkers, sticky RFID labels are attached to each box. As the boxes are loaded onto a crate, the labels are read by an RFID scanner that records the time and exact location, as well as what crew is harvesting the produce. That data is transferred to a centrally-accessible database.

Next, the boxes are driven to Tanimura and Antle’s unloading dock, where they’re again scanned. Here, technicians can make a key measurement: the time it has taken for the produce to arrive in the cooler from the field.

The boxes are scanned again in the cooler and again when it’s time for them to leave the plant and move closer to a customer. At each interval, a company technician can glimpse the history of each box. When the boxes of produce get to Wal-Mart, then Wal-Mart officials continue to record the shipments’ every move until they make it to the shelves.

While getting the system to work has taken years of research, there’s still a long way to go before Tanimura and Antle can wholly rely on RFID technology. Currently, less than 1 percent of the company’s volume is tagged with RFID labels. A major barrier to full implementation is the price of RFID technology, namely the chips. The company now pays about 10 cents for each RFID chip and about 40 cents for each label. When there’s an surplus of product in the market, as there was recently in the Valley with lettuce, paying an extra 50 cents per box of produce is very expensive. “That’s huge,” says van der Bijl. “Until we can find a way to reuse the RFID labels, it’s safe to say that a 50 cent cost per box could erase the [produce’s] profit.” Another challenge is improving the rate at which the RFID labels are read when they’re scanned. Currently, only 70 percent of the RFID tags on a pallet get read during a scanning.

But van der Bijl is optimistic. Tanimura and Antle just ordered a new batch of RFID tags that are superior in every respect, including the distance at which they can be scanned. “We are already transitioning to the new tags,” says van der Bijl. “I expect that with these, we’ll see the 70 percent scan rate probably go closer to something like 100 percent.”

When asked if the company has kept the project under tight wraps to prevent other growers from copying their ideas, Hailstone and van der Bijl shake their heads. “There are no secrets in the Valley,” says Hailstone.

That’s something Tanimura and Antle officials plans to use to their advantage. “If only we use RFID, then we won’t have a lot of purchasing power,” van der Bijl says. “But if the whole industry does it, the price of the technology will go down. We see huge opportunities with this.”