Solving Ag Labor Issues with Automated Harvesters

Solving Ag Labor Issues with Automated Harvesters

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

Skilled farm labor is becoming far more challenging to come by, and producers of labor-intensive commodities have started turning to robots. Mushrooms, for example, is an industry Sean O’Connor of 4AG Robotics saw could use automation, especially, he says, with how fast the crop grows.

O'Connor... "But you know, the typical robot, it bolts onto a ground rail that we put alongside the racks and it just goes back and forth 24 hours a day picking mushrooms exactly when they should be picked. Because again, when you have a crop that doubles in size every 24 hours, if you're doing an eight-hour shift with human labor, you're often picking mushrooms at the end of the shift because you know that they'll start colliding with other mushrooms or their caps will open up by the next morning. So you pick them too quickly. Whereas if you know, I can come back in three hours and pick that, you know, gain the extra yield and weight that'll come with it. A robot is able to do that, you know, shift labor can accommodate."

O’Connor says their robot isn’t designed to completely eliminate human labor, but instead supplement for shortages.

O'Connor... "In the perfect world, no one ever gets fired because of our robots. And you have 40 percent of your staff turnover annually. So if you've got, you know, a thousand people that are picking mushrooms, you're going to lose 400 people over the next year as they go on to do any other job because picking mushrooms out of chicken manure, bent over, climbing up and down racks all day is a pretty difficult way to make a living. It allows the farms to be able to deploy them in a method where they're not worried about, you know, the HR components. They're just hiring less people each year and replacing more with robots."

That’s 4AG Robotics CEO, Sean O’Connor.

Previous ReportSolving Ag Labor Issues with Automated Harvesters
Next ReportMolecular Farming - Part One