Morning Star

With 4000 consistent and high-quality plants per hour, and operated by just one person, the TTA-ISO High Speed Grafter can be called a true revolution in grafting. American company Morning Star has been using the machine since January 2024. And the results are spectacular. Nana Bekoe-Sakyi, an expert in Agricultural Technology with extensive experience in grafting tomato plants, leads the project team at Morning Star. Nana speaks highly of the TTA-ISO High Speed Grafter and was instrumental in its development.

Grafting keeps the industry moving forward
“Wherever you are in the world, everyone in the agricultural sector faces significant challenges. Scarcity of skilled labor, strict regulations in crop protection, drought, diseases, abiotic stress, rising prices, you name it. Especially here in California, it's very challenging. The environmental laws here are the strictest you will find in the US. The big question is: how do you find solutions for these challenges? I believe grafting is one of the answers for the processing tomato industry. With grafting, we can quickly create resilient tomato plants that can withstand these challenges and yield 10% - 30% more than the hybrid cultivar. However, producing grafted plants in the volumes required by the industry is hard to imagine. At Morning Star alone, over 700 million transplants are needed each year with a production window of 3-4 months. A race against time. Another obstacle is the price. How do you keep the costs of grafted seedling low while labor costs rise?"

“So, we started looking for machines that could help us with this. That's how we found TTA-ISO Horti Innovators and as of 2022 had implemented eight TTA-ISO Graft 1100 semi-automatic grafting machines. Yes, it worked, but we still needed human hands and decisions to operate. And given the volume we were aiming for, we had to think bigger. We did so together with TTA-ISO. We combined their technical expertise with our experience in grafting and growing tomatoes to develop the TTA-ISO High Speed Grafter."

The TTA-ISO High Speed Grafter in practice
Since the start of the TTA-ISO High Speed Grafter at Morning Star, the machine has already grafted close to a million plants. Enough to draw the first concrete conclusions. “The TTA-ISO High Speed Grafter exceeds the expectations of what we thought was possible,” Nana continues. “We can now handle 4000 plants per hour and have increased our success rate significantly. A huge step. The biggest gain lies in the addition of Vision AI Software and the absence of human hands. The size of the rootstock stem and the cultivar stem, the height of the plants, whether there are gaps at the grafting point; where people used to make this selection, now AI does the work. The result is a much higher quality finish and stronger plants. And the price of grafted seedling also went down, partly due to a significant decrease in labor costs."