Robo-harvester and indoor

agtech company join forces

with a focus on food security
The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted vulnerabilities
in the interconnected global food supply chains. An agtech
acquisition could shore up fragilities using robots, AI and
more.
The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted vulnerabilities in the
interconnected global supply chains. At times, pandemic-related disruptions in
the food supply have forced US producers to bury crops and plow edible
produce into fields. On Thursday, indoor agriculture company
AppHarvest announced that it had acquired RootAI, a robotic agtech
company. The news could help shore up fragilities in the global food supply
with artificial intelligence, sustainable farming practices and more.
"Farming as we've known it is broken because of the increasing number of
variables such as extreme weather, droughts, fire and contamination by
animals that make our food system unreliable," said AppHarvest Founder and
CEO Jonathan Webb.

"Indoor farming solves for many of those challenges, and the data gathered
can exponentially deliver more insights that help us predict and control crop
quality and yield," Webb continued.

Last fall, AppHarvest planted its first crops of tomatoes at its sprawling 2.76
million-square-foot indoor farming complex in Morehead, Kentucky, and the
company announced that it had "surpassed shipment of 1 million pounds of
sustainably grown Beefsteak tomatoes" in February. As part of the acquisition,
Josh Lessing, Root AI co-founder and CEO, will become AppHarvest's CTO
and lead the development of "robots and their AI capabilities for the network
of indoor farms that AppHarvest is building," the release said.
"One of the key challenges in agriculture is accurately predicting yield. Many
downstream decisions from work scheduling to transportation to retail
planning are based on that. Any deviation between projection and actual yield
can result in fire drills for numerous functions to adjust for the change, and AI
can help solve for that," Webb said.
The robotic harvester uses a suite of cameras and infrared laser to map its
work environment and uses this information to assess a tomato's orientation
and gauge whether it is "ripe enough to pick," the release said, and these
scans allow Virgo to determine the "least obstructive and fastest route" to
pluck produce using its onboard gripper and arm.

In August, Root AI's produce-picking harvesting robot, Virgo, flexed new

dexterity skills as it picked strawberries and cucumbers. (In previous videos,
Virgo was shown picking tomatoes off the vine.)
"A piece of food—whether that's a tomato or a berry or a cucumber—is an
outcome from many variables that are part of the growing process. Enhanced
data collection for each plant through the robot can lead to insights that teach
us precisely how to design better, more resilient food systems that are reliable
and that produce more food with fewer resources," Lessing said.

AppHarvest expects the Morehead complex to produce about 45 million

pounds of tomatoes each year, according to a press release, and the
company has a stated goal of building 12 farms throughout Kentucky and
Central Appalachia before the end of 2025.
"Joining forces with AppHarvest is a natural fit: we want to ensure a stable,
safe supply of the nutritious and healthy food that people should be eating—
grown sustainably—and doing that at the scale of AppHarvest gives us the
opportunity to make the greatest difference," Lessing said.