Their work shines

摘要

As consumers increasingly buy apples by color, and as Michigan growers continue to shift to the fresh market, growers there have been experimenting more with reflective fabric to get light to fruit on the bottoms of trees.Traditionally, fabric is laid by hand in Michigan in what is a three-person job, but at least one grower family is working to automate the process — a task that hasn'tcome without challenges.Kyle Rasch's early attempts at an automated color-fabric roller involved a discarded trampoline. "It was not ideal," said Kyle, 25, a third-generation grower in Greenville, Michigan, northwest of Grand Rapids. "We could do only one row at a time, and itwas a slow process, but it did the job."