Canopy management activities such as bundling, tying and pruning are labor intensive and time-consuming operations in red raspberry production. These activities cost farmers more than $3,000 per hectare/year. Although, some mechanization techniques are available for tying the branches of fruit trees and vines, and for baling of leaves and straw, research on the development of mechanized systems for managing cane berry plants has not been reported yet. As the work is highly labor intensive, and the labor availability is dwindling, mechanization/automation in canopy management is essential for the long-term sustainability of the red raspberry industry. The current research focuses on the development and evaluation of a novel raspberry bundling and taping mechanism. Material such as cotton string or rope are generally used for tying. However, adhesive tape was used for taping bundled primocanes in this work as it simplified the taping mechanism by eliminating the knots that are required when string or rope is used to tie the canes. Field test results of the mechanism showed a bundling success rate of 94%; of 249 canes targeted for bundling, 235 were properly bundled. Of the 92 tape wrapping attempts, 76 attempts were successful in taping bundles of canes, a success rate of 83%. Then mechanism was further modified for speed, and overall operational time was decreased to 30 seconds from 3 minutes. We also evaluated the feasibility of using adhesive tape for holding the tied canes together for desired duration in red raspberry production. Type I tape (tensile strength 316 N/m) showed failure in 5% of the taping cases whereas type II (tensile strength 27N/m) showed failure in 18% of the case by the end of the six months evaluation period. The mean fruit yield between 45 randomly selected, machine tied raspberry plants was 313.98 ± 220.24 (mean ± SD), which was statistically the same as the yield from manually tied raspberry plants (293.08 ± 240.33) when tested with two sample t-test (F1,88 = 0.185, P = 0.67) at 5% significance level. These results were promising for the development of an automated machine for red raspberry cane bundling and taping
