OUR NEXT MOVE IN AUTOMATION By Walt Duflock, Senior Vice President, Innovation
Over the past five years, Western Growers has made some big moves in automation. Since launching the Global Harvest Automation Initiative (GHAI) in February 2021 in Tulare, Calif. with the goal of automating 50 percent of specialty crop farm labor in 10 years, Western Growers and our partners have made some meaningful progress on our automation efforts—but there is still lots of work to be done. Here are the highlights as we approach mid-field—the five-year mark on a 10-year program.
1. WG developed automation events to help growers and startups talk more. We have found more ways to get growers and automation startups into the best place for them to have real conversations—at live field demonstration and field trial events in the dirt with the people building and supporting the robots. First, we launched FIRA USA with our partners at GOFAR and UC ANR. We went to Fresno (2022), Salinas (2023) and Yolo County Fairgrounds in 2024 and 2025. Each year, we have added new robots and more growers started coming in part because as of 2024, growers get into FIRA USA for free. FIRA USA is a three-day conference with in-room content and live demos on production acreage. Second, we launched the Desert Difference with our partners at YCEDA. This is a two-day event focused specifically on desert growing conditions and solutions. These events have served as a launching pad for international startups like Ecorobotix and Niqo Robotics to enter the U.S. market and as a great starting place for sales conversations with growers. 2. WG developed WG Case Studies to help growers identify success stories. We understand that the biggest challenge for growers is not whether startups can build automation solutions that do the job. Rather, the big challenge is often whether it can do the job at economics that work for the grower. Based on that, we launched two case studies (and more are on the way) around specific automation solution providers—Carbon Robotics and Stout Industrial. For Carbon Robotics, after extensive data collection and analysis done in conjunction with Braga Fresh and JV Smith, we compared 3,200 acres of eight certified organic crop types in year one and found a total labor cost for weeding of $2.1 million, then looked at year two when the robot was added and the cost was $1.3 million. It turns out you pay for a Carbon Robotics LaserWeeder ($1.4 million and support and maintenance) by saving $800,000/year on labor weeding costs. Then we took it one step further and released grower economic templates to help growers do their own comparison, because the results will vary based on whether growers are weeding conventional or organic crops, domestic or H-2A labor and owning or leasing tractors to
drive the weeding robots. The case studies help the growers understand what data to collect, and the economic templates help them understand how to analyze the data around an ROI opportunity. 3. WG partnered with Reservoir Farms to give startups a place to demo and trial. One of the biggest opportunities to help automation startups was to help them reduce the time and capital they needed to get to their first product. Many automation startups need $50 to $100 million in capital and five to seven years (or more) to get to commercial scale. One of the ways to reduce both of those numbers was to provide a real-world working farm, where startups could have shared R&D work space, shared ag equipment and shared acreage feet away from the R&D space. This is why WG is a key strategic partner for Reservoir Farms. Their initial facility provides all of the above with 40 acres of commercially grown crops in Salinas, and John Deere tractors are available to help the R&D teams test out their equipment any time they want on the crops they selected, grown the way WG members grow them. And once the machines work, they can use the acreage for demos for growers and partners like OEMs and distributors. Reservoir Farms and WG members working together can help startups achieve first product status in less time and with less capital. 4. WG did some analysis on the factors increasing the need for automation. First, we published two Global Harvest Automation Reports with Roland Berger to give a global view on automation efforts, what was working and not and what factors were having a positive impact (or not) on the growth of automation. Second, we collaborated with Professor Lynn Hamilton at Cal Poly on the labor economics created from regulatory cost increases on specialty crop growers—from $109/acre/year in 2005 to $1,600/acre/year in 2024. In addition, Hamilton helped us determine, that for the 850 million hours of farm labor California growers hire, two-thirds are for harvest and one-third are for non-harvest (weeding, thinning, spraying, harvest assist, planting) with a high variance by specialty crop type (i.e. strawberries are 80-90 percent harvest with long harvest windows).
12 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com November | December 2025
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