Future Acres Wants to Bring Robotics to Farmworkers

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

This week we’ve been exploring Future Acres, a farm robotics company helping table grape growers. To attract investors, they launched a crowdfunding campaign, which CEO Suma Reddy said is also a great way to get people to care about agriculture.

Reddy… “How do we take something like agriculture and as we know, right, most people are very disconnected from food systems and agriculture, but start helping with that story.”

Reddy and team used their early investment money to build and validate a prototype. Now they’re rolling out 10 more units for harvest season this year.

Reddy… “Our goals for 2022 is then to use that as our foundation and build not just one but 10 units by harvest season of this year. So harvest season really starts, you know, July into November, but our goal is September, really to roll these out and then to pilot with some of our fantastic farm partners.”

Reddy said labor-saving robots is just the beginning when it comes to bringing more automation to agriculture.

Reddy… “We will be able to automate other parts of the process. And so we're starting with transport because in the grand scheme of things, right, it's a bit of a low hanging fruit of being able to get done. And we know picking is a bit of the holy grail, right? That fantastic folks like, you know, Advanced Farms and FF Robotics are focusing on.”

Learn more at FutureAcres.co.