Iron Ox isn’t like most
robotics companies. Instead of trying to flog you its technology, it wants to
sell you food.
As the firm’s cofounder
Brandon Alexander puts it: “We are a farm and will always be a farm.”
But it’s no ordinary farm.
For starters, the company’s 15 human employees share their work space with
robots who quietly go about the business of tending rows and rows of leafy
greens.
Today Iron Ox is opening its
first production facility in San Carlos, near San Francisco. The
8,000-square-foot indoor hydroponic facility—which is attached to the startup’s
offices—will be producing leafy greens at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads a
year. That’s the production level of a typical outdoor farm that might be five
times bigger. The opening is the next big step toward fulfilling the company’s
grand vision: a fully autonomous farm where software and robotics fill the
place of human agricultural workers, which are currently in short supply.
Iron Ox isn’t selling any of
the food it produces just yet (it is still in talks with a number of local
restaurants and grocers). So for now, those tens of thousands of heads of
lettuce are going to a local food bank and to the company salad bar. Its
employees had better love eating lettuce.
The farm’s
non-lettuce-consuming staff consists of a series of robotic arms and movers.
The arms individually pluck the plants from their hydroponic trays and transfer
them to new trays as they increase in size, maximizing their health and
output—a luxury most outdoor farms don’t have. Big white mechanical movers
carry the 800-pound water-filled trays around the facility.
At first, making sure these
different machines worked together was tricky. “We had different robots doing
different tasks, but they weren’t integrated together into a production
environment,” says Alexander.
So, Iron Ox has developed
software—nicknamed “The Brain”—to get them to collaborate. Like an all-seeing
eye, it keeps watch over the farm, monitoring things like nitrogen levels,
temperature, and robot location. It orchestrates both robot and human attention
wherever it is needed
Yes, although most of the
operation is automated, it still does require a bit of human input. Currently,
workers help with seeding and processing of crops, but Alexander says he hopes
to automate these steps.
But
why go to the trouble of automating farming at all? Alexander
sees it as solving two problems in one: the shortage of agricultural workers
and the distances that fresh produce currently has to be shipped.
Rather than eliminating jobs,
the company hopes, the robots will fill the gaps in the industry’s workforce.
And he believes that by making it possible to grow crops close to urban areas
without paying city-level salaries, the automated farms will enable stores to
chose vegetables fresher than those that had to travel thousands of miles to
get there. That is, assuming the startup can get its prices to match those of
traditional competitors.
“The
problem with the indoor [farm] is the initial investment in the system,” says
Yiannis Ampatzidis, an assistant professor of agricultural engineering at the
University of Florida. “You have to invest a lot up front. A lot of small
growers can’t do that.” This could risk creating a gap between the big farming
institutions and smaller family-owned operations, in terms of gaining access to
new technology. Despite this, Ampatzidis says that bringing automation to both
indoor and outdoor farming is necessary to help a wider swath of the
agricultural industry solve the long-standing labor shortage.
“If
we don’t find another way to bring people [to the US] for labor, automation is
the only way to survive,” he says.
Credit:
https://www.technologyreview.com
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