Meet the farmers of the future: Robots
A robotic arm lifts plants being grown at Iron Ox, a robotic indoor farm, in San Carlos, Calif. At the indoor farm, robots maneuver through a warehouse, tending to rows of leafy, colorful vegetables.
SAN CARLOS, Calif. — Brandon Alexander would like to introduce you to Angus, the farmer of the future. He’s heavyset, weighing in at nearly 1,000 pounds, not to mention a bit slow. But he’s strong enough to hoist 800pound pallets of maturing vegetables and move them from place to place on his own.
Sure, Angus is a robot. But don’t hold that against him, even if he looks more like a large tanning bed than C-3PO.
To Alexander, Angus and other robots are key to a new wave of local agriculture that aims to raise lettuce, basil and other produce in metropolitan areas while conserving water and sidestepping the costs of human labor. It’s a big challenge, and some efforts have flopped. Even Google’s “moonshot” laboratory, known as X, couldn’t figure out how to make the economics work.
After raising $6 million and tinkering with autonomous robots for two years, Alexander’s startup Iron Ox says it’s ready to deliver its robotically grown vegetables to people’s salad bowls. “And they are going to be the best salads you ever tasted,” says the 33-year-old Alexander, a one-time Oklahoma farmboy turned Google engineer turned startup CEO.
Iron Ox planted its first robot farm in an 8,000-square-foot Iron Ox CEO Brandon Alexander looks over his robotic indoor farm in San Carlos, Calif.
warehouse in San Carlos, California, a suburb
25 miles south of San Francisco. Although no deals have been struck yet, Alexander says Iron Ox has been talking to San Francisco Bay area restaurants interested in buying its leafy vegetables and expects to begin selling to supermarkets next year.
The San Carlos warehouse is only a proving ground for Iron Ox’s longterm goals. It plans to set up robot farms in greenhouses that will rely mostly on natural sunlight instead of high-powered indoor lighting that sucks up electricity. Initially, though, the company will sell its produce at a loss in order to remain competitive.
The world’s population is expected to swell to 10 billion by 2050 from about 7.5 billion now,
making it important to find ways to feed more people without further environmental impact, according to a report from the World Resources Institute .
Iron Ox, Alexander reasons, can be part of the solution if its system can make the leap from its small, laboratory-like setting to much larger greenhouses.
Alexander worked on robotics at Google X, but worked on drones, not indoor farms. While there, he met Jon Binney, Iron Ox’s co-founder and chief technology officer. The two men became friends and began to brainstorm about ways they might be able to use their engineering skills for the greater good.
“If we can feed people using robots, what could be more impactful than that?” Alexander says.