Gary Wishnatzki knows a thing or two about strawberries. As a third-generation grower and CEO of Wish Farms, he oversees about 2,800 acres of berry farms in Florida and California. But Wish Farms had a problem—it couldn't find enough people pick its berries.
In 2013, Wishnatzki and his partner, Bob Pitzer, set out to address what’s been called a labor crisis in America’s agricultural industry. They founded Harvest CROO Robotics, an agricultural technology company that’s developing a robot capable of automating the berry-picking process.
“Strawberry growers recognize that we have a labor challenge,” Wishnatzki said. “The availability of labor has been a challenge over the past 15 years or so.”
While economic and political factors play a role in the diminishing agricultural workforce (most farmworkers in the United States are immigrants, many of whom face the risk of deportation), Wishnatzki stressed that he considers this a demographic problem.
“There just aren’t enough young people in the world to do the work we’re trying to get done,” he said.
Headquartered in Tampa, Harvest CROO currently has about 20 employees, including engineering specialists focused on things like robotics, machine vision and navigation. The company has raised around $10 million dollars from investors, according to Wishnatzki.
Weighing in at between 25,000 and 30,000 pounds, Harvest CROO’s robotic berry picker is the size of a small bus. The robot consists of a big, box-like vehicle that acts sort of like a mothership. Within the vehicle are 16 smaller robots working in tandem to pick plants. The entire system relies on the technologies like artificial intelligence, machine vision, big data and GPS to do the task efficiently.
Harvest CROO holds six patents that Wishnatzki thinks give it a competitive edge over other berry-picking robot companies. The most notable is for what he calls the “Pitzer wheel,” named after his co-founder, which feature a series of claws that allow the robots to continuously pick and collect berries.
“It spins in a similar orientation as a Ferris wheel,” Wishnatzki said. After one claw picks a berry, “the next claw rapidly presents itself to pick the next berry. We can go around the plant and pick, pick, pick, rather than having to pick and move.”
Strawberry picking is hard, backbreaking work for humans, requiring dexterity and a deft sense of which berries are ripe for harvest. While machines don’t suffer the same kind of exhaustion as people do, they’re far less dexterous. One of Harvest CROO’s challenges has been to develop the robot to perform with the same precision and speed as people can.
Another challenge the company faces is the seasonality of Florida’s strawberry season, which runs from around December to April. “You’ve got to cram in a lot of testing in a short amount of time,” Wishnatzki said. “Then you’ve got to wait until the next crop cycle to come around.
Wishnatzki added, “The current concept is sound. We believe we’re approaching it the right way. Now we just have to get everything hardened and prove that we can do it reliably for a long period of time.”
An automated berry picking system may sound like a luxury, but Wishnatzki thinks it will be a necessity in the foreseeable future. When Wishnatzki testified before Congress prior to 2018’s Farm Bill, he made his position clear.
“If we don’t solve the labor problem for crops that require an abundance of labor to harvest, it’s going to be a bleak future for fruits and vegetables,” he said. “Prices will become unaffordable.”
