Holland’s tulip fields look like a postcard. Behind the color sits a highly mechanized industry that plants, scans, tops, lifts and sorts bulbs on a tight seasonal clock.
Most people only see the bloom. For growers, the flowers are a short and slightly inconvenient phase in a year that is really about the bulb underground.
That bulb has to be planted, protected, harvested, cleaned, graded and stored before it can be sold. More and more of that work now runs on specialized machines, vision systems and early-stage robotics. [Read more…] about The Machines Behind Holland’s Tulip Bulb Harvest