DAVIS, CA - Labor continues to be a hurdle to production and harvest in the fresh produce industry. As access to extra hands becomes increasingly slim while input and wage costs rise with no end in sight, a few great minds have put their skills to the task.

“Many of our friends are growers, and it doesn’t take long in talking to a grower to hear about how difficult it is to find labor,” Kyle Cobb, Co-Founder and President of advanced.farm shared with me. “Farm work is hard and expensive, and even today the most complicated tasks are still done by hand. Knowing we had the skills to build sophisticated tech to perform tasks in tough environments, we decided to start advanced.farm. The numbers for fresh fruit harvest are staggering—literally, millions of people are moved around the world as visiting workers to help perform an already expensive task. We don’t see this as a sustainable future for farming, and we think robots have a place on the farm just like they do today in factories and warehouses around the world.”

advanced.farm is the second brainchild of Kyle and his Co-Founders, Marc Grossman and Cedric Jeanty.

“Even when we were kids, Marc was a bright technologist. So, it was no surprise that he pursued engineering at Caltech University, where he met our Chief Technical Officer Cedric Jeanty. My early career was in mergers and acquisitions in New York City, where I’d been on the buy-side of deals, specifically noting how small businesses built meaningful value over time. With this experience, I first teamed up with Marc and Cedric in 2010 to start a company called Greenbotics,” Kyle said.

Greenbotics sought to build low-cost robotic solar panel cleaning systems until it grew to be acquired by global energy company SunPower, paving the way for the trio’s next focus.

With a successful foundation and well-rounded experience, advanced.farm’s leaders now build robots to perform the tough tasks on a farm that still require a delicate human touch.

“We’re currently focused on developing a robotic apple harvester to help growers bridge the labor gap during the most critical part of their season. In the near future, we’ll also add pruning and thinning upgrades to our machines to help growers with their work all year long. Our vision is to transform the work in all treefruit orchards—including citrus and stonefruit, for example—in the same way that the combine harvester has done in broad-acre crops,” he explained.

In the next decade, advanced.farm projects it can significantly reduce the peak labor demand for growers by about 50 percent while making the jobs of farmworkers significantly safer, more productive, and more lucrative. One example Kyle gives me for instance is removal of all ladders from orchards, with humans working alongside its robots and touching 10 times the number of trees each day than what can be done by people alone.

“It’s important not to let our vision get in the way of our current focus, which is to scale robotic harvesting in the Washington apple industry over the next several years,” Kyle stated, bringing us back to the present. “During our in-field testing in 2024, we picked hundreds of thousands of apples for leading growers in Washington. We did this with a single prototype machine that demonstrated an average pick rate of 2,500 apples per hour (three times faster than a human) while handling fruit just as gently as a human would. Our advances this past season in speed, reliability, and postharvest handling have proven to be important as we move to engaging growers across many more acres in 2025.”

When talking about the ideal suppliers who might align with this burgeoning technology, Kyle shares that taking a systems-level view on how work in the orchard impacts other aspects of the company, preharvest, postharvest, all the way to the consumer experience, in combination with advanced.farm. 

“We work to be good partners to our grower customers, and that also means being honest if we see signs that a grower is not a good fit for our technology or vice versa,” Kyle clarified.

Qualities that have been a part of grower readiness in adopting advanced.farm robotics in the past include robot-first horticulture strategy, willingness and ability to change some aspects of operations, and a scale that allows some financial risks.

“Testing costs money for everyone involved. It’s important to find ways to share risks, and stay invested in an outcome that might take more than one season to come to bear,” Kyle shared.

Spoken as a true member of the fresh produce industry! With much on the horizon for this ag technology, AndNowUKnow will continue to report.