Sacramento Region Innovation Awards: Advanced Farm Technologies Inc. – Sacramento Business Journal – The Business Journals
We’re introducing the companies recognized at the Sacramento Region Innovation Awards, presented by the Sacramento Business Journal. This is the honoree in the food and agribusiness category.
Advanced Farm Technologies Inc. co-founder Kyle Cobb says human beings are pretty amazing. He knows that because it is incredibly difficult to build autonomous robots that can do what a person can do.
The company has deployed 16 of its strawberry-picking robots in California, up from 10 earlier this year, and it has two apple-picking machines working in Washington.
The machines harvest around the clock using advanced robotic arms and custom cameras linked with software to find and pick ripe fruit. It’s a challenging task because pickers must choose ripe from unripe, fruit from leaves, and then not ruin the fruit picking it. Most of the company’s 60 employees work just south of Davis in some old barns. Nearly all fresh produce globally is picked by hand, and Advanced Farm is helping farmers who face difficulty finding farm labor.
Eventually, the company could also develop pickers for other specialty tree fruit producers, from stone fruit to avocados. In harvesting tree fruit, the robots offer the advantage of not requiring laborers to climb and descend ladders all day long. Advanced Farm sees a future in autonomous harvesting of all sorts of delicate specialty crops, said Peter Ferguson, director of business development with Advanced Farm.
“Labor is a difficult issue for farmers, and there is a lot less available every year,” Ferguson said.
At the end of last year, Advanced Farm raised $25 million in an investment round led by venture capital firms and corporate investors. The harvesters can work autonomously 24 hours a day, taking some of the pain out of the growing shortage of farmworkers available to harvest food. The apple pickers were deployed in Washington this summer. They have picked tens of thousands of apples with positive feedback from farmers, Ferguson said.
The company leases the machines to growers, so the farmers don’t have to come up with a big payment. To the farmer, the model is similar to the cash-flow of paying employees.
Advanced Farm was founded in 2017, and it delivered its first prototype in 2020. The company continues to innovate its designs, with the latest pickers also automating packaging of strawberries, making them even more efficient.
The company designs, fabricates, builds and assembles its equipment in Davis, and plans to stay in the area as it ramps up production. The company’s employees include software engineers, firmware engineers and mechanical engineers, along with technicians and field-based positions and a sales team.
The Essentials
Innovation name: Robotic fruit harvesters
Top executive: Marc Grossman, CEO
Headquarters: Davis
Number of employees: 60; 50 in the Sacramento area
2021 revenue: Not disclosed
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