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Earlier this week, a California startup called Advanced Farm Technologies announced it had raised $7.5m in seed funding (the venture capital kind) to continue development of its strawberry-picking robots, Axios reports.
In short: Farmers can’t find enough flesh-and-blood humans to pick their berries anymore.
In California, 40% of farmers have not been able to find enough laborers over the past 5 years — and a similar story has taken root across the rest of America, as well.
As a result, 56% of Californian farmers have started automating their farming processes in the past 5 years, and most of them say they are turning to robots due to labor shortages.
Farmers have found ways to automate planting, weeding, and monitoring their crops — but picking fragile, juicy berries has proved to be one of the most difficult tasks for farm-bots to tackle.
That doesn’t mean Advanced Farming Technologies has been the only company trying to pick berries: Another American ag-tech startup called Harvest Croo and a Spanish startup called Agrobot are also working on building bots that can handle berries with sweet, sweet care.