New machine could help harvest strawberries as industry sees decline in labor

PLANT CITY, Fla. - The number of laborers willing to work in strawberry fields has been on the decline for years. The industry was ripe for innovation, and machines could soon mimic human hands to harvest the berries.

At Wish Farms in Plant City, the dwindling labor force has been affecting the business for close to a decade.

"He's probably losing 25% of his crop each year just because of shortage of labor. So we've been working for the last seven or eight years trying to figure out how to pick strawberries automatically," said Joe McGee, Executive Chairman and CEO of Harvest CROO Robotics.

Harvest CROO Robotics has developed a fully autonomous strawberry harvesting machine that can navigate its way through acres of fields, running about 20 hours a day.

Commercial testing just wrapped up, and the company said it has a fully working robot that can fill the void of six to 10 human pickers.

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"We're planning to have these machines available for December for deployment of Florida," McGee said.

It has taken years of prototypes and testing for this artificial intelligence to reach the level of human parity. McGee said the team took on one of the most difficult fruits to pick, developing technology that delicately handles the ripe berries, then sorts, sanitizes, cools and packs the fruit without damage.

Each harvester is 32-feet long and 18-feet wide with 16-robots underneath working independently to scan every plant. 

"Agitates the leaves, spins around, looks at the plant, decides what strawberries are ready to be picked. Creates a targeting solution, then picks it," explained McGee.

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He said about 70% of the U.S. strawberry industry is invested in the company, the majority of the business is actually out in California. The plan is to aggressively scale production next year to churn out around 1,500 machines, moving the fleet between growers in Florida and the West Coast. 

"We are not planning to sell the machines, and we're not leasing the machines. We will own the machines and operate. And we are offering to match the price that they pay the human labor," McGee said.

McGee said the harvester will transform the industry, and could make strawberries healthier and more affordable.