Semiconductors Help Keep Track of Crops

There’s something different this year about the hundreds of workers harvesting strawberries at the Bob Jones Ranch in northeast Oxnard. They’re all carrying compact semiconductors.

The dime-sized “memory buttons,” attached to each worker’s ID card, keep track of how many boxes each employee fills, how much the worker has earned, even which fields are producing the best yields.

Every time a worker brings in a filled box, an employee called a “puncher” aims a wand-like computer probe at the worker’s memory button. “You hear a beep and the information is recorded,” says Jones administrative accountant Ann Woods.

The system is saving time and money at the 250-acre strawberry ranch, which employed 700 pickers at the peak of the harvest season last month.

“We’ve been able to reduce our costs by combining the punchers’ duties with several others,” Woods said. “And we now need fewer clerical workers.”

In addition, she said, field supervisors are now able to go home earlier because they no longer have to tabulate each worker’s cards at the end of the day. “And instead of storing thousands of cards in huge boxes as we had to do before, we now keep our labor records in a couple of computer disks.”

Woods said the Jones Ranch has invested about $12,000 in the system. “We’ve already saved at least that much this year, and from now on we’ll save even more because we won’t have the start-up cost.”

She said she has heard that at least one other Ventura County farm operation is using memory buttons. The buttons are made by Dallas Semiconductor Corp. of Dallas, Tex., and were customized for agriculture by Agricultural Data Systems of Laguna Niguel.