FEATURE STORY BEYOND THE WAY WE’VE ALWAYS DONE IT By Michelle Rivera, Senior Communications Manager
Canadian startup Sami Robotics, the first Western Growers-sponsored resident at Reservoir Farms, is bringing a new generation of multifunctional harvesting robots to California fields.
From left: Sami Robotics Co-founders Eric Lapalme and Pascal Labrecque
A few years ago, Sami Robotics Co-founder Eric Lapalme returned to his family farm where he grew up in Quebec. As an engineer, he had spent years developing technology and watching industries transform through automation. Yet as he walked the fields, he was struck by something familiar: the harvest crews were still doing the same work by hand that he had done as a teenager. While robotics, artificial intelligence and automation were reshaping industries around the world, many specialty crop growers continued to face the same labor-intensive challenges they had decades earlier. That moment became the spark behind Sami Robotics, a company that is now developing large-scale robotic harvesting systems designed specifically for fresh produce growers. And what began as a conversation between Lapalme and entrepreneur and robotics expert Pascal Labrecque has evolved into a rapidly growing agtech company with employees in Canada and California, pilot-scale commercial machines and a growing presence in the specialty crop industry. Their goal is ambitious: create a multifunctional robotic platform capable of performing a variety of field tasks, with
an initial focus on harvesting broccoli and lettuce, all through interchangeable tools and software applications. And after three years of development, that vision is beginning to take shape in the field. Looking Beyond Labor Costs When Labrecque first heard Lapalme’s idea, he was skeptical. A serial entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in robotics, Labrecque had previously built and sold successful medical imaging companies focused on artificial intelligence. From his perspective, replacing human labor with expensive robotic equipment did not initially appear to make economic sense. “I thought people didn’t believe in the idea because you can’t replace low-cost labor with expensive robots,” Labrecque said. But after speaking with growers across North America, he quickly realized he had misunderstood the problem. The issue was not simply labor cost; it was labor availability. Growers consistently told him that finding enough workers at the right time had become one of the biggest challenges facing specialty crop production. In some cases, crops were not being
30 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com July – September 2026
Made with FlippingBook Ebook Creator