Strawberry   fields dotted with hunched-over workers picking and packaging, then pushing the delicate red fruit to waiting trucks -- it is a typical winter scene embedded in the patchwork of homes and farms that make up eastern Hillsborough County. That scene is changing, though, as the labor pool shrinks and technology comes knocking. Wish Farms owner Gary Wishnatzki and his engineer partner Bob Pitzer are banking on technology. As strawberry season wrapped up in February, their driverless strawberry-picking machine drove into the fields for some test runs. The results were impressive and enlightening , Wishnatzki said. For some three years now, farmers have been forced to abandon millions of dollars worth of strawberries in fields, mostly in Hillsborough and Manatee counties, because they lacked laborers, industry experts say. The problem has been just as serious in California, Arizona and other farm communities. The reasons for the shrinking worker pool are numerous. Migrant workers who have picked the fields for years are aging. Young adults in migrant families already in the United States are getting better educations and have more choices these days, including the construction industry, which again is on the upswing. Stricter security is allowing fewer undocumented workers to cross the border from Mexico. And Mexicans are having much smaller families now  -- just over two children per family, compared with 7.3 per family in 1960, according to a Pew Hispanic Center report released in 2012. And since Mexico's economy bounced back faster than that of the U.S., more Mexicans have been able to find work closer to home, according to the study. "We came up with a concept we perceive as a necessity," Wishnatzki said. "The labor pool has been shrinking for over 10 years now. It has been pretty harmful." So in 2012, he and Pitzer formed their partnership, Harvest CROO Robotics, to develop a mechanical picker. The Harvest CROO design has multiple picking heads that will move across a field, picking 25 acres over a three-day period, the typical time for picking fruit as it ripens. It has a "vision system" to distinguish between red and green strawberries and is able to get under the leaves to find and pick the ripe berries. Picking strawberries is nothing like using a combine on a corn field, coming through and thrashing down the plants. Strawberries are delicate and ripen in various intervals, which Harvest CROO is taking into account in developing its machine. A strawberry-picking machine will never completely replace the need for human labor in the fields, Wishnatzki said, but if the machines can supplement labor enough to keep the industry profitable, he and Pitzer will have met their goal. Which of the following describes the typical winter scene of eastern Hillsborough County?
Farmers work hard on a corn field. Workers pick and package strawberries. Scientists test machines in strawberry fields. Farmers operate strawberry-picking machines.