Farm Robots: Service or Product?

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Many emerging ag robotics companies are bringing their technology to market by offering a service such as weeding or spraying or tilling. But at some point, farmers will want to own the robots themselves. Curtis Garner, co-founder and chief communications officer at Verdant Robotics says they’ve decided to move from a service model to a sales model for this reason.

Garner... "The company has been operating as a service from inception and there was consistent requests from the customers to purchase the units because growers like to own their units. It helps with their risk mitigation that we talked about earlier. And we finally decided, you know what, we're enforcing kind of a customer-first culture within the organization. And it was time to live that customer-first culture with our business model. So we decided, all right, the customers want to own the units. Let's Move to a sales model that changes the relationship with us, right? Because when I own a unit, I kind of become part of the family. And there's also a deeper integration of kind of R&D, because you get that feedback from the owners about the new capabilities they would like to see the robots being used in and there's just a ton of innovation in the ag space, particularly with growers. They always see new opportunities. So we want to have that relationship with the growers and we want to build out those tools for them and with them."

The company's Sharpshooter Smart Sprayer is now available for purchase.