Most commercial farming depends on harvesting fruit long before it's ripe, so this won't work there. For high-priced boutique fruit and personal farms, though, it should save a lot of work.

Buttress the trunk. Lay on the ground under fruit trees a thick layer of soft foam. Then tilt the whole tree with its soil sideways several degrees. Fruit then doesn't need to be picked, but will fall down and gently roll to a stop where it can be collected by hand or machine with hardly any bruised.

If the farm is small enough or the trees tall enough or the trees already planted on a slope or terrace you could just use foam much thicker on one side.
-- Voice, Nov 11 2016

I'm pretty sure trees don't work like that.
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 11 2016


I'm pretty.

Sure, trees work like that.
-- normzone, Nov 11 2016


In our observation, trees don't work at all. They perform very poorly as taxi drivers or bricklayers, but oddly do surprisingly well compared to the majority of employees of local government.

We consider that this idea is likely to be practical. [+]
-- 8th of 7, Nov 11 2016


Could you do the same thing with a massive wedge of foam that goes around a statndard tree, on level ground, up to the lower branches?

There would have to be a breathing space around trunk to stop rot. Also the face of the wedge could be a spiral channel, for the control of the fruit drop into containers

Or maybe, soft but resilient netting.
-- wjt, Nov 12 2016



random, halfbakery