Advances in winegrape mechanization reduce production costs while maintaining or improving quality.LABOR ACCOUNTS for a substantial fraction of the production costs of most fruits, including grapes. Manual harvest is particularly laborious, and was thus among the first tasks to be mechanized.Since the 1960s, when commercial grape harvesters first came into use, vine training and trellis systems have been developed and refined to facilitate mechanical harvest, and harvest machines also steadily improved such that most winegrapes in California are now machine-harvested.
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