The latest automation technology already helps horticulture industry professionals cut labor costs while ensuring healthy growth and a hassle-free harvest. Could the cannabis industry be next in line to use robotic technology?
By Karli Petrovic
From the Terminator franchise to The Jetsons, popular culture has often explored the complex ways robots interact with humans. This type of artificial intelligence might be generations away from reality, but the latest innovations in robot technology can help greenhouse growers and nursery owners slash labor costs without disrupting the workflow of the humans who labor alongside them.
Although it might seem like science fiction, Harvest Automation has been bringing futuristic technology to greenhouse industry customers since 2013. The forward-thinking manufacturing company developed the HV-100 “spacing, re-spacing, collection and consolidation” robot.
And for the right cannabis growers, this same technology could make a big difference in how businesses operate.
The concept for Harvest Automation started in 2006 when Charles Grinnell met Joe Jones while both were working at iRobot, the makers of the Roomba vacuuming robot. Jones was part of the four-member team that invented the Roomba. Grinnell, on the other hand, had a background in high-level technical engineering management and zero experience with agriculture or robotics. Still, he found the industry — and Jones — to be incredibly interesting.
“When people think about robots, they think we’re a lot closer than we actually are to the ones they see in the movies,” Grinnell said. “Joe is a very grounded, practical guy. We decided to start a new company with the idea that we could develop another successful robot product.”
Despite the success of the Roomba, Jones cautioned against trying to create another robot for the consumer market. Instead, the two co-founders looked into industries where companies deployed large amounts of human manual labor, including meat-packing plants and farms. Ultimately, they decided on the greenhouse and nursery industry, with Grinnell as chief operating officer and Jones as the chief technology officer.
Grinnell said $15 billion of plants are sold each year in the U.S. along.
“That’s billions of plants, and most have to be moved around to be produced efficiently,” Grinnell said.
This means that greenhouses and nurseries need workers to bend over, pick up plants, move them from the growing area to the finishing area and set them down approximately 18 inches from the surrounding pots — all while knowing that as the operation ships the plants to its customers, the finishing area will need to be consolidated to make room for the next round of plants. These types of jobs are referred to as stoop labor, and greenhouses and nurseries have an incredibly difficult time finding domestic workers willing to do this tough, monotonous task that is ultimately essential to their businesses.
As a result, nursery operations often hire a lot of undocumented workers. This is risky because if companies get caught, they can expect big fines in addition to having to fire anyone who isn’t legally able to work in the U.S. With labor costs accounting for 50% of nurseries’ overall expenses, Grinnell said there was a huge opportunity to alleviate this “pain point” with automation.
Once Harvest Automation had its focus, the real work began. In 2008, Grinnell started raising money for what would be a very expensive project. In 2010, the Massachusetts-based company closed its first round of multi-million dollar capital, which allowed it to hire a serious engineering team to help design and build the product. By 2011, the alpha version of the robot was being tested at greenhouses and nurseries all over the country, and two years later, the final version was being shipped to customers.
This final version is the aforementioned HV-100. At $30,000 per robot, these 21-inch-tall, 24-inch-wide, battery-operated helpers are built to last 10,000 hours (approximately 40 hours per day, five days per week for five years). The typical payback period for an operation is 12 to 24 months, Grinnell said, and many growers of all sizes consider the automation to be worth the price tag. In addition to efficiently moving and spacing 15% more containers than a human worker could, the robots also collect and consolidate them as similar-looking individual plants are plucked from the finishing space and shipped to the operation’s customers.
Another key innovation is that the robots were made to safely work around human laborers without getting in the way. The optical sensors are designed to see the environment and navigate even small spaces accordingly. Rain or shine, on even ground or rocky gravel, the robots perform, Grinnell said. Overall, the technology has been a resounding success for the industry.
“Customers were really excited we had solved the problem,” Grinnell said. “Going into the future, we realized we had a pretty powerful platform for robotic capabilities and are exploring new markets. It’s a great solution to make labor two to three times more productive.”
While Harvest Automation is currently looking into helping vegetable growers, warehouses and distribution centers, Grinnell said the technology can be a great option for any business that requires moving things from one area to another. A few cannabis growers have reached out to him in the past, but Grinnell said the operations tend to be too small for the robots to make sense. For those that grow on a larger scale and move large numbers of plants around to different rooms, however, having a robot could be worth the investment. Grinnell also noted that in an industry where having fewer workers around the product is ideal for security, anti-theft and safety reasons, the robots are a good option.
“In the greenhouse and nursery industry, our largest customers have thousands of acres of production areas, and the smaller guys have something like six acres in Long Island,” Grinnell said. “The big guys buy five and the little guys buy two, but they all have the same issues and are more or less growing in the same way.
“The robots are great for moving things from point A to point B, a job that humans aren’t good at and don’t like. I can imagine the marijuana industry has some jobs that are like that, and that’s where the automation really makes sense.”