Before diving in, we’re sharing some exciting recent footage of our “F” model robots picking at peak speeds of ~800 picks per hour.
Our customer is one of the world’s largest commercial strawberry farms, and our robots pick right alongside the human pickers, requiring no changes to how the farm operates.
And now, onto the big ideas!
In our last two posts, we examined the success of the global agricultural system, as well as the brittleness and unsustainability baked into its design. We detailed major efforts to increase the system’s resilience through methods like controlled environment agriculture. And, we discussed how resilience results in reduced environmental impact and increased sustainability.
Now, we’ll explain how robots will catalyze the success and resilience of farms, and controlled-environment farms in particular.
Rather than just telling you how, we’re going to show you — by tracing a pound of strawberries back through the supply chain, from your fridge all the way to the farm. Then, we’ll turn that process on its head — revealing how robots change every step of the process, and in doing so, transform the entire system.
The sad state of your fridge
When was the last time you bought a pound of strawberries — and ate each and every one? As delicious as they can be, the actual product in your fridge often falls short of the ideal. More often than not, you open the fridge and find some, or most, of the berries in the batch uninspiring. Maybe they taste watery or like chemicals — unsurprising, since strawberries are the “dirtiest” of our produce, and can have up to 14 trace pesticides on them in the store. Maybe you find mold, bruises, or thumbprints, or maybe there are just more berries than you wanted. Whatever the reason, you probably end up throwing much of it away — like 40% of all food in America is.
The not-so-super market
Think back to buying those strawberries in the store. You likely only had one or two options. If you’re savvy, you picked up a container or two and tried to inspect for problems. Sometimes there are way too many at the stand, and sometimes they’re all out. Sometimes the berries are fresh, and sometimes they look like they’re going to get tossed in the dumpster in a few hours — the fate for up to 50% of displayed strawberries, in one recent study.
The long, cold journey
The supermarket probably bought the berries by the truckload, having no idea about their quality until they arrived. They did their best to optimize their order size — too many berries means wasted money and fruit, but too few means lost sales. Companies like wholesalers, traders, and big farms worked hard to move your berries thousands of miles from the farm to your store, sending these truckloads along a “cold chain,” from one refrigerated storage unit to another, on a journey that can last up to a week. This long, costly journey requires tough berries that can survive the bumpy ride and still look good when they meet your eye at the market. Tough berries are, as you might guess, not the most delicious or nutritious ones. Estimates are that 10% of berries don’t complete this journey.
Do it well, or do it quickly? Yes.
Because strawberries are only ripe for a few days, and because there aren’t enough people around who want to pick fruit for a living, there is an incredible urgency on the farm. Workers are paid more for faster picking, but can’t make too many mistakes, either. Those berries have to be picked, or they rot in the field. Pickers snap fruit quickly off the plant and pack them directly into the same containers which you eventually take home.
The name of the game in the field is speed. But on top of picking fast, the pickers also have to make sure the berries look good when you buy them. That means throwing out any mistake or any berry that’s subpar because of a bruise, or insect damage, or a weird shape, or if it’s too small. The pickers do all of this on a scorching, dusty farm, for 8 hours a day. And then, they do it all over again the next day, until the season is over.
And the rest is hard, too
A huge amount of cost, time, hard work, and thought goes into getting berries ready for harvest, and the farmer and their workers are at the center of it all. Farmers must make sure your berries are healthy, affordable, and tasty. But they’ll often be forced to spray your berries with pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides to keep other living things from eating them before you can. They’ll send people to trim plants and prepare them for harvesting. They’ll do whatever they can, so long as the costs don’t outweigh the price the supermarket is willing to pay them. And that price is lower and lower, while the costs are higher and higher.
After all that, 30–40% of berries that the plant grows may not make it off the farm, because of their size, appearance, or pests.
So now you’ve seen the whole journey. The berries you buy — and often throw out — are the way they are due to the efforts of a mind-boggling number of people paying attention to hundreds and thousands of details. All of this effort results in well over 50% of all berries grown never getting eaten, with some estimates as high as 60–70%. Wasted food is estimated to contribute up to 8% of all global greenhouse gases, not to mention all the wasted effort, inputs, and costs.
If you put a robot at the center of the farm, however, everything changes.
Preparing for harvest is less costly and more sustainable
With robots driving through the farm every day, you can imagine a farmer has a much easier time getting your berries ready for harvest. Robots shining UV light at night can control pests and mildew without spraying harmful chemicals, and at a lower cost. Robots trimming the plants and scanning for problems make the plants healthier and stronger, so they can put more energy into making berries. And robots track each individual berry in the field, so that you can trace their journey all the way to your store. Rather than 40% of the crop being wasted before harvest, sustainable farms with robots could see that number drop to 5% or less.
Harvests are more careful and consistent
Your berries will be healthier and fresher because of how robots harvest. Robots aren’t perfect, but the mistakes they do make are very consistent, and today’s robots already make fewer mistakes than humans. Fewer bruises, fewer not-quite-ripe berries — robots can work fast, be careful with the fruit, and make consistently correct decisions, doing so over 95% of the time and squeezing small margins of extra yield out of each plant. And by letting those ripening berries stay on the plant, the farmer gets even more yield, too, as the fruit swells like a water balloon in its last few days. Robots work all hours of the day — including the middle of the night, when berries are best harvested away from the day’s blazing heat. Robots can even pick bad fruits that the farmer doesn’t want growing on the plant, and do it earlier than human pickers might.
Human pickers, meanwhile, will be freed from the arduous labor of picking to take on higher-paying technical roles supervising the robots, or perform other, higher-value jobs robots can’t do.
Information everywhere
Because robots have near-perfect memory, every single one of your berries is accounted for — a photo or even video could follow each berry all the way to your store. The farm can know about your berries well before they are ready for harvest. They’re able to optimize their operations and better plan their sales to the supermarket you’ll buy them in.
Locally grown (with robots)
With robots, a controlled environment farm is able to withstand the global labor shortage and grow better berries, as well. They can also grow those berries closer to the city or area where you live. Rather than a journey of hundreds or thousands of miles, your berries might only need to travel up to a hundred. That means berries that spend less time in transit and more time staying fresh on shelves near you.
The supermarket is happy, too: they knew exactly what their berries would look like, all the way from the field to the shelves, and the farm was able to give them an accurate forecast of how much they would be able to buy. And as you look through the berries, they smell fresher, look fresher, and due to all these increases in efficiency, cost half as much as they used to.
As much (or little) as you want
Much of America’s food waste happens due to buying in bulk. Berries are sold in pound containers because it’s too hard to ask pickers to fill smaller ones. But because robots are different, you might buy ¼ or ½ pound containers instead. Maybe you only wanted a sleeve of four berries as a snack, or maybe you wanted just enough to bake that dessert. If you knew you wouldn’t waste them, you might even buy berries more often. The benefits to our individual health and the pleasure we derive from the food we eat are immense.
Now multiply this experience — better product, at a lower cost, in more convenient sizes — by millions of supermarket shoppers every day. Based on consumption patterns in the world, we believe robots and controlled environments together could double the size of the global berry market from $30 Billion to $60 Billion, and if you want to dream even bigger, just imagine how this impacts so many other fresh produce categories like tomatoes, peppers, and really anything you might buy in the supermarket.
All this, thanks to robots
Hopefully, this journey showed you how robots are more than a solution to a labor shortage. They are also the gateway to a world of radically fresher, healthier and more delicious food, grown more sustainably and with less waste along every point along the chain of production. And that, we can hopefully all agree, is good for everyone of us.
Next time, we’ll talk about why Tortuga is pioneering a new philosophy in robotics, and why this difference is key to our success.
