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For two and a half years, Iron Ox has been working on perfecting its farm robots so they can maintain their farms indoors. After first testing its systems on a small scale, the company opens its first fully autonomous production farm and plans to market its products in the near future.
The farm currently produces a number of leafy greens, including romaine, butter and kale, as well as basil, coriander and chives. The robots that deal with these plants are Angus, a 1,000-pound machine that can lift and move the large hydroponic boxes in which the products grow, and iron robotic arm for harvesting products.
As Iron Ox co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander told me, the current configuration can produce about 26,000 plants per year and is equivalent to an acre open-air farm – although this is obviously inside and much denser.
Alexander said his co-founder, Jon Binney, and himself had decided to embark on inland farming after working for a number of other robotics companies – for Alexander, this which includes a move to Google X -, where the focus was often on creating innovative technologies and not on how these robots could be used. "We had already seen a lot of things about robotics and wanted to avoid that," he told me. And while the founding team was planning to go into warehousing or drone logistics, she finally opted for agriculture because, as Alexander says, she did not just want to build a good business, but also a business. which would create a social good.
Today, the vast majority of types of leafy vegetables (the type of product on which Iron Ox concentrates) in the United States is grown in California and Arizona – especially during the colder winter months in the rest of the country. This means that a romaine lettuce sold on the East Coast in January often traveled over 3,000 km to achieve it. "That's the reason we went inside," said Alexander. "We can decentralize the farm."
It is also helpful that an indoor hydroponics farm can achieve a 30 times higher yield than an outdoor farmhouse during a year, while using a lot less than $ 50. 39; space.
To get to this point where Iron Ox can operate an independent farm, it took a lot of work and engineering. The most difficult challenge, explained Alexander, was to have the robotic arm examine the plants using its stereo cameras and then plan the pickup operation to harvest the products, which are not always uniform. And to carry out this operation autonomously, it must obviously do so reliably.
Angus, the biggest robot who picks up the 800-pound pallets in which the products are grown and brings them to the robotic arm, also took a long time to get to work. After all, you do not want to move these pallets quickly, otherwise you will have a lot of water to mop up.
All this, including the system that monitors plants, their growth, the sensors that monitor them and the hydroponic system, is then controlled from a cloud service that tells robots when to harvest and what to do. . The robots themselves, however, perform these tasks autonomously.
One thing, however, that surprised the team is that running a farm indoors only with LED lighting always results in electricity bills that are simply too expensive to make the operation profitable. Iron Ox relies on more traditional greenhouses that are complemented by high efficiency LED lighting.
This means that the team can not build these self-contained farms directly in town, because you can not stack exactly several greenhouses on top of each other. However, as Alexander noted, even if you have to be about 20 kilometers from the city, it is better than sending products to a supermarket thousands of miles away.
As Alexander pointed out, the team spent a lot of time talking to farmers and existing chefs to determine what they needed. It turned out that farmers were mostly complaining about their inability to find work. And this is not a surprise. The labor shortage in the agricultural sector is starting to become a major problem for farmers, especially in states like California. As for the chefs, they were mainly looking for quality, of course, but also predictability and consistent quality.
The plan now is to start selling the products from the first farm and expand them to bigger and bigger locations over time. Iron Ox also has the means to do this, knowing that it has raised more than $ 5 million, including $ 3 million announced earlier this year.
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