Autonomous fruit-picking robot company Advanced Farm Technologies Inc. is adding more barns and manufacturing space to build its equipment.
The company started with a third of a barn on agricultural property just south of Davis. It now has the entire original barn, another barn on the same property and another barn and ranch-style home that serves as headquarters and home to engineers.
The choice to stay with agricultural roots, rather than leasing a warehouse in a city, was intentional, said Peter Ferguson, director of business development with the company.
"Our company is based in Davis, and a lot of our people live here," he said.
Advanced Farm designs, fabricates, builds and assembles its equipment in Yolo County, just outside the city limits of Davis
The company will have 16 of its robotic strawberry pickers working this year.
Workers are finishing two of the robots now for delivery to farms as the picking season starts to accelerate. Advanced Farm has nearly doubled the number of its machines every year for the past three years, Ferguson said. The company was founded in 2017 and delivered its first prototype in 2020.
Advanced Farm has 70 employees now, up from about 35 last year and up from 12 employees at the start of 2021, Ferguson said.
The company is addressing the shortage of labor to hand-pick fruit that can't be mechanically harvested by tractors or non-smart equipment.
The typical California farm with 100 acres of strawberries requires about 200 pickers to work it, Ferguson said. California has about 34,000 acres in strawberries, which accounted for $3 billion in revenue in 2021, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Ferguson said growers spend about $1.5 billion a year to pick the fruit.
Advanced Farm charges growers a fixed rate of $5,000 a month to pick the fruit, and the gas-electric vehicles can operate around the clock.
The Advanced Farm harvester automatically senses and picks red, ripe fruit from in-soil strawberry beds. It uses cameras of the company's own design that refresh many times per second to find the fruit. It uses color sensors to determine ripeness before picking the fruit with gentle grippers.
Advanced Farm last year also sent its first robot apple picker to Washington state, and that machine picked 70,000 apples in three months. The company won a Sacramento Region Innovation Award last year.
The apple picker is on a taller chassis and uses the same optical equipment, software and mechanical arms. Advanced Farm is exploring expanding that machine to stone fruit.
The company doesn't disclose revenue, and it also doesn't disclose what it costs to build the machines, Ferguson said.
In 2021, Advanced Farm raised a $25 million “series B” funding round led by Los Altos-based Catapult Ventures and which included Kubota Corp., an Osaka, Japan-based maker of farm machinery; Yamaha Motor Co. Ltd. of Iwata, Japan; and Impact Venture Capital of Sacramento.
