Advanced Farm Technologies, a startup based in Davis, California, has raised $7.5 million from investors for its strawberry-picking robot that it hopes will revolutionize the industry, according to The Robot Report.
Company CEO Marc Grossman said the investment will help introduce the first robots and, “with this investment, we can expand our lead in robotic strawberry harvesting and continue to innovate in other areas.”
Experts say that tightening immigration policies in the United States that have exacerbated labor shortages in fruit pickers has encouraged growers to more seriously seek technological solutions that they can deploy as soon as possible in order to prevent widespread damage to their industry, according to Breitbart.
The strawberry industry employs a large number of illegal immigrants, especially in Florida and California. It is an extremely significant field, as "in 2017, the United States produced 1.6 billion pounds of strawberries, valued at nearly $3.5 billion,” according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center.
This has led to a situation in which there are currently at least eight startups seeking to improve the automated harvest of strawberries through various methods.
Another such example is Harvest CROO Robotics, which is developing in Plant City, Florida a robot to replace up to 30 stoop laborers with several technicians and engineers. Many strawberry growers are funding the research, and the developers hope to start using their robot-pickers by the end of this year.
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