Jana Tian’s agriculture technology journey took a challenging turn when the building in which her prototype robot was stored in San Francisco burned.
That set about some extraordinary bootstrapping to keep the very young company going. Tian and her Upside Robotics team spent the next growing season staying in an RV on farms in Ontario as they tested their small row crop fertilization robots, as they only had one prototype instead of the two to three robots they’d hoped to have to try.
Why it matters: Farmers need technology to increase productivity, but the journey to adoption can be rocky and challenging.
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To service the robot meant “it ended up being a seven-day-a-week operation. But through that we were able to learn really, really fast, especially on the hardware side.”
Tian’s experience is an example of the lengths entrepreneurs will go to support their businesses as they grow in the rollicking world of ag tech.
She was part of a panel put on as part of the first Ag Robotics Working Group in-person event held at The Grove at the Western Fair District at the same time as the London Farm Show.
The other panelists included Cory Derycke of HarvestCorp Technologies, which makes autonomous asparagus harvesters, Stefan Glibetic of Mycionics, a company that automates mushroom harvest and Matt Stevens of Finite Robotics, an orchard automation company.
They all are well into the development of their technology and talked about barriers and potential ways that could help get their technology to market.
Where is their technology today?
Derycke says HarvestCorp is moving its autonomous asparagus harvester from the design phase to manufacturing. The harvester helps farmers because it lowers the need for labour and asparagus harvesting is a process that’s uncomfortable for workers.
“The design and manufacturing is kind of happening simultaneously with design being, of course, a little more forward than the manufacturing,” he said.
Mycionics is a 10-year-old company and its mushroom harvesting has undergone 33 prototypes to get the robots to work in a difficult environment, says Glibetic. The company has pilot projects in Canada and Europe and plans to be in the market in the next year. The technology helps reduce labour and provides data for farmers on the crop’s development
Half the cost of fruit is in labour and includes three main tasks, pruning, thinning and harvest, says Stevens from Finite Robotics. Reducing those orchard labour costs will help farmers. The company only started last year, is testing products this year and hopes to be in the marketplace next year. Their robot is nine feet tall, six feet wide and helps with pruning and thinning.
Upside Robotics is moving quickly and Tian says they hope to scale testing from 70 acres in 2024 to 1,200 acres. They believe from last year’s trials that they can drip nitrogen on crops weekly, running in between rows and reduce the need for nitrogen by 50 to 70 per cent, which could reduce costs for farmers. They went through about 50 prototype changes last season.
“We really feel like now our hardware is ready to live in the field and be on the field the entire season.”
Why is agriculture technology so hard to fund?
Venture capital for agriculture technology has dried up over the past two years, plunging from the heady days during and immediately following the COVID pandemic. But the most powerful type of investment could be in helping farmers take more risks on technology.
Farming is different from other easy-to-understand software services that get all the venture capital attention.
“It’s been a challenge to fundraise because agriculture; one is very seasonal; and two, for us it’s hardware-based, so we are competing against SaaS (software as a service) or AI-based software, which they expect returns to be very fast,” said Tian.
They were able to raise $5 million in the U.S., but she said more is needed.
“We were able to find amazing customers in Ontario who were willing to take the risk and adopt our robots before they were ready.”
Stevens knows the challenges of both startup companies and farming as he’s an apple farmer. He comes from a technology background with a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Waterloo and created and sold an electric fleet company called FleetCarma, but his roots are in farming and he’s returned to those now.
“The more there can be funding to help farmers purchase our tech, to de-risk it for them and make their life easier, that is phenomenally powerful funding,” he said. Purchasing of the technology by farmers is the best signal that it’s of value, said Stevens.
Glibetic spent a lot of time last year pitching the system to venture capitalists and got no funding from them.
“Funding is very challenging in the hardware space,” he said.
Instead, he’s relied on government program funding and funding from farmers, especially support from Murray Good, an Ontario mushroom farmer who has provided facilities for Mycionics to test its robots.
He also echoed Stevens’ suggestion that finding ways to limit risk to farmers adopting new technology would be helpful.
“There seems to be this intrinsic fear in the agricultural community for introducing robotics compared to more traditional technologies that have been widespread and heavily adopted,” he said.
Looking away from the U.S.
An employee of the federal government trade service asked the panel about markets other than the United States.
Corn is king in the U.S., so Upside Robotics will always have an interest there, but it is based in Ontario.
Tian has worked with a robotics accelerator in New York, developed products and found funding in San Francisco. The U.S. has a $100 billion corn market, but Ontario still has a significant $4 billion.
“We decided to pilot here and base our headquarters here because of the market, but also because of the talent,” she said. “It’s incredible, the mechatronics engineers at the University of Waterloo and also at Guelph.”
Glibetic said that the U.S. has outdated infrastructure for growing mushrooms so isn’t the focus and the potential is more in Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and China.
HarvestCorp has had interest from Italy, which grows a lot of asparagus, and their focus is Canada, but Derycke said they were recently invited to Oceana County in Michigan, which is the largest asparagus-growing region in the United States.
Finite Robotics looks to where the cost to grow fruit and employ labour is highest, so Stevens said Europe would be the natural next step for them.
The need for speed
All of the companies on the panel are moving and improving their machines and software very quickly and they say that while they appreciate partnerships with government and universities and colleges, they don’t move research fast enough to help.
The ecosystems at the universities, however, are valuable.
“I’m a huge fan on the talent side and the ecosystem,” said Stevens. “So Upside and Finite, we’re both in Velocity (a University of Waterloo accelerator). “We’re right beside each other, which is awesome. We benefit and we learn from Jana and Sam so much, and we try and reciprocate.”
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