4AG Robotics CEO Sean O’Connor says he founded the autonomous harvesting company with mushrooms in mind because he saw an opportunity to address labor shortages in agriculture.
“We thought through where is the largest issues when it comes to access to labor, the mushroom industry was clear No. 1,” he says. “Largely just because of the way the crop growth goes. The crop doubles in size every day. So, it grows by 4% an hour. It grows in a fairly chaotic manner, and so you have to be able to stay on top of the beds when they’re in that harvesting cycle. And because of that, there’s no seasonality to mushroom harvesting.”
And the 365-day nature of mushroom cultivation presented a unique opportunity and challenge, something he says fascinated the 4AG Robotics team.
“It’s also the most difficult crop to automate harvesting for,” he says. “It’s more delicate than a strawberry, more delicate than a tomato. It bruises easily. It splits easily. How you pick the mushrooms has a massive impact on the yield that a farm can produce.”
O’Connor also says he saw an opportunity to use data to help mushroom growers better understand the best time to harvest the mushrooms to maximize revenue.
“If you pick a mushroom at four o’clock in the afternoon, but the right time to pick is four o’clock the next morning, that’s 12 hours more growth,” he says. “That’s 48% more growth or revenue that you’re able to derive from that mushroom if you’re able to pick it at the exact time it should be fixed.”
He says that while it wasn’t exactly quick to develop the autonomous solution, he says it works on Dutch track growing systems, with no need to modify production systems to make it work. And he says customers wanting to add more harvesters helped push the company to this next funding round.
“That was really the catalyst for this financing, is that we’ve got robots that work,” he says. “We’ve got customers that want a lot more of them. And now we need to figure out how do we scale our manufacturing and scale the business?”
Riding the Mushroom Waves
He says the company has been riding the mushroom wave of growing interest among consumers, seeking out new flavors and eating experiences.
“You have this wonderful crop that’s literally growing at an extraordinary rate, and people are being able to scoop up more of it,” he says. “I think for us, we always knew that it was going to be a stable crop, one that was going to be a part of people’s diets.”
But O’Connor acknowledges automating mushroom harvest, or really harvest in general, has been a challenge for agtech companies. He says he and the 4AG Robotics team believed that with a specific approach, they could provide a solution. And artificial intelligence (AI) has really helped bring more actionable information to growers to make better harvesting decisions, he adds.
“The industry itself has gotten us to a place where we can make decisions with variable information that we couldn’t do when we had to build software or use heuristic methodology to make decisions,” O’Connor says. “That’s really powerful when you’re talking about optimizing when to pick each specific object that’s growing at such a quick rate.”
Future Goals
And as for the future? O’Connor says he expects to see some big changes in the mushroom industry quickly. While many farms converted to the Dutch track growing system in the late 1980s, he sees a similar precipice in the mushroom industry, where farms will decide on whether or not automation is a fit in the future.
“If they’re right, and they commit, they’re going to have a cost to them of being able to produce mushrooms at 60%, 70%, 80% of their competition, because you have a crop that turns over every week into revenue,” he says. “You’re effectively going to be seeing the farms that automate, scale and consolidate the industry, and those who don’t see financial woes and end up having to either be consolidated or go out of business.”
This summer, 4AG Robotics’ Series B funding round closed at 40 million Canadian dollars. Cibus Capital, an investment firm focused on sustainable food and agriculture, was the co-lead for this round. O’Connor says this funding will help the company get its technology into the hands of more growers and also help existing customers add more harvesters.
While his technology might seem like it could work in different commodities, as of now, O’Connor says the 4AG Robotics team doesn’t plan to expand into other crops in the foreseeable future. He says 4AG Robotics’ focus is on maximizing revenue for mushroom growers.
“We’re already seeing this now on one of our farms that we’ve gone from being a labor replacement solution into a yield generating solution that we’re no longer just giving you the same amount of mushrooms, but without the labor costs, but we can provide an increase in your yield every week, because our robots can pick for 24 hours a day and pick a mushroom exactly and should be picked,” he says.
O’Connor sees AI playing a greater role in the future of the company, where a grower can understand the quality of the clusters and weight as well as looking to yield forecasting and communicating that to customers.
“It won’t take us long to be able to say at the start of the week, if we see what the bed is looking like, we can communicate to the farm what they have to sell to their customers in advance of actually being able to pick it, in advance and starting its process of expiration,” he says. “All these little things where we can just give a slightly better logistics engine to these farms to become the operating system allows them to be most efficient using the artificial intelligence that we create or adding more automation into the packing room of these farms as well, or other opportunities like that.”
