Mechanical green chile harvesting advances, annual conference hears
LAS CRUCES — Mechanical harvesting of one of New Mexico’s favorite crops is inching closer to reality, experts reported at the annual New Mexico Chile Conference.
Green chile is still harvested by laborers due to challenges in picking peppers — and removing the stems — by machine. Some experts have said the move to mechanical harvesting is needed to keep the commercial chile industry alive in the long term in the face of a labor shortage and growing competition from Mexico.
More than 200 attendees, including some from other countries, gathered at Hotel Encanto for the conference earlier this week.
Stephanie Walker, conference co-chair and chile researcher for New Mexico State University’s Cooperative Extension Service, has been working to develop a type of green chile that’s more easily harvested by machines. Last summer was the second that the breeding lines reached certain benchmarks when harvested using a machine, she said.
“It left less in the field,” she said. “The breakage was about equivalent to the commercial varieties (of chile).”
If the green chile passes its third trial this year, the next step would be to release it as a chile strain to be grown by farmers who want to mechanically harvest the crop, Walker said.
It’s been a slow but steady process reaching this point, Walker said. Developing chile varieties, creating a successful mechanical harvesting machine and developing a chile de-stemming machine have all been components taken on by different people at the university or in the industry.
“We started developing these breed lines 10 years ago,” she said. “We had to put a lot of pieces together.”
The mechanical de-stemming of green chile is considered to be one of the biggest remaining hurdles to large-scale mechanical harvesting.
Nag Kodali of New Hampshire, inventor of a chile de-stemming machine, said the first of his machines to be installed in a commercial chile processing plant is set happen in California. A production facility near Deming is considering installing the device, too.
His machine was part of a 2015 trial near Hatch that paired the destemming machine with a mechanical harvester. Since then, Kodali said, he’s made advancements to the device and has been working with an Arizona farmer who’s breeding chiles that are more easily de-stemmed.