How cider fruit came to be picked by machine

The traditional sequence was to let the fruit fall, help it down with a long panking pole, and gather it by hand into baskets, hampers and sacks. It was slow, cold work done by whole households — men, women and children — over several weeks, and in most cider districts it was casual labour paid by the bushel or the sack.

Letting fruit fall and lie is not neglect. Cider apples are picked ripe or slightly over-ripe, and a period on the ground allows late ripening and a degree of softening that helps milling. The practice of holding fruit to sweat before pressing extends the same logic.

What the system needed was a floor that made fruit findable, which is what grazing provided. Stock kept the sward short, ate the earliest windfalls, and left a surface on which a gatherer could see what was there.

Dessert and culinary fruit must reach the consumer unmarked, so it is picked from the tree by hand into padded containers and handled gently at every stage. Nothing about that process can be given to a machine cheaply.

Cider fruit has no such constraint. It is going to be milled to pomace, so a bruise, a split or a stalk torn out is of no consequence provided the fruit is sound and is processed before rot sets in. The one real constraint is contamination — soil, stones, mud and rotten fruit — and that is a problem of the orchard floor rather than of handling.

So the mechanisation problem for cider reduced to two operations: get the fruit off the tree, and get it off the ground. Both were solvable with agricultural engineering of a fairly ordinary kind.

A machine cannot work a tussocky grazed sward with stock on it. Mechanical harvest requires a short, even, stone-free surface, mown rather than grazed, and preferably firm enough to carry a tractor and trailer in a wet October.

That requirement removed grazing from commercial cider orchards, and with it the mixed farming logic that had made standard orchards worth keeping. It also changed the sward itself: a mown, sometimes herbicide-managed strip beneath the trees supports far less than the unimproved grassland it replaced.

The tree spacing had to change too. Shakers and sweepers need rows, headlands and turning room, which is one of the reasons mechanisation and the shift to bush orchards happened together rather than one after the other.

Fruit gathering was one of the last large seasonal employments of the rural West Country, and its disappearance is part of the same story as the end of the cider allowance and the emptying of the villages. A crop that had occupied dozens of people for weeks came to occupy two people with machinery for days.

This was not a change made against the workers’ wishes so much as one made because they had already gone. Seasonal gathering was poorly paid, physically punishing and undertaken because alternatives were scarce; when alternatives appeared, the labour supply did not persist.

The consequence for the fruit is that harvest timing is now set by machine availability and by processing capacity rather than by how many hands can be assembled. That is a real gain in reliability and a real loss in selectivity, since a machine takes everything on the ground at once.