Potential Of Farm Robots In Agriculture Sector

Increasing costs, labor challenges, and rising environmental concerns have created a lot of potential for farm robots and the startups that build them.

US-based Future Acres launched its “harvest companion” robot, Carry, last year. In trials, Carry has been used for AI-powered crop transport, working specifically with grapes. Other specialty crops are planned for the future. The Future Acres team is also developing precision spraying, crop counting, and crop picking features for subsequent iterations of carrying.

Leading the charge is co-founder and CEO Suma Reddy, a longtime entrepreneur who has worked both with startups and smallholder farmers over the course of her career – including co-founding indoor farming startup Farmshelf before linking up with Wavemaker Partners to spin out Future Acres.

In a recent conversation with AFN, Reddy (SR) discussed her path to the farm and the experiences, both business and personal, that have informed her commitment to agriculture and climate tech.

Recognizing and Solving Problem for Agriculture

By 2050, we’ll reach a population of 10 billion, need to increase our food production by 50% using no more land, and reduce our emissions by 75%.

We’ve seen with many specialty crop farms that labor is declining 7% a year, which ultimately means potentially 20% less crops that are harvested, with 20% less revenue for the farm; and that means 20% less food shipped to our grocery stores, it felt like a real problem that needed to be solved today. What I get excited about is that we start with solving the labor problem, but really is a platform to solve other types of problems.

For example, on the farmworkers side, our tagline is: “We build advanced mobility solutions.” We’re starting with Carry, an autonomous harvest companion that increases production efficiency, improves farm worker safety, and provides real-time data analytics.

The second piece is around the state of workers in our farm economy. Are there little things that we can do to make life better and easier not only using autonomous equipment, but also from a systemic perspective? We’re also planning on implementing educational, vocational, and skill-building programs starting this summer – teaching kids about the intersection of agriculture and robotics and getting more folks excited to be working in this space.