Farmhand Automation: How Maine ag-tech startup hopes to empower local farmers with robots – Seacoastonline.com

Kennebunk High School graduate Alex Jones isn't looking to make his Biddeford-basedag-tech startupthe next unicorn. His company, Farmhand Automation, doesn't need a billion-dollar valuation to achieve the kind of scale he has in mind.

Jones said the end goals he and his team are pursuing with their battery-powered farming robots include supporting sustainable growth for small and mid-sized local farms. That, he said, would empower smaller growers toparticipate more fully in food distribution systems, which are currentlydesigned for and dominated by large-scale farming operations.

"Our baked-in mission is to advance the decentralization of sustainable agriculture across the United States," he said. "That is really what we are focused on."

As a public benefit corporation,Farmhand Automation is a business with an additional charter that outlines its mission, Jones said. And that mission has been attracting financial backing from a variety of sources.

The company, which was founded in 2019,raised nearly $500,000 from "passionate angel investors" both locally and across the countryand matching funds from theMaine Technology Institute, Jones said. That allowed the company to spend two years of development with a team of about three people, he said.

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Last month, Farmhand Automation was announced as a winner of a $250,000 grant through theMaine Clean Energy Innovation Challenge, which is a joint initiative of MTI and the governor's energy office. The company aims to raise another $500,000 for the next phase of its work, Jones said, so the team can add three positions:a systems engineer, a software developer to focus on customer-facing applications, and a second mechanical engineer to focus on the tools the Farmhand Automation robots will use.

Jones said the company is focusing onautomatingthree key farming tasks: weeding, planting and soil cleanup. (Harvesting remains a more challenging task to automate, he said.) The top focus right now is on weeding.

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The current design, which looks something like a Mars rover that travels up and down rows of vegetables, marks locations of where to place plants and records those positions using GPS that way, when the robot comes through to agitate the soil around the plants without disturbing the plants themselves, it can do so without using sight technology, Jones said.

"We're trying to create a robot that is not any faster than a person, at this point. It drives at walking speed. It moves tools around the same level a person would. And what we want to do is ... we want to price this in such a way that your annual cost on this thing for the first five to seven years is going to be about the cost of a part-time laborer."

Although the robots are still being designed and built, Farmhand Automation has set a target price of $25,000 for a base model, which is the same cost as an entry-level tractor, Jones said. With a bank loan, farmers would pay off the robot in five to seven years, with a plan to keep using it for a total of 20 years, he said, likening the business model to that used for solar energy investments.

When asked about the impact these robots would have on farmworkers, Jones said the idea is to facilitate an alternative to the realities of industrial farming that underliethetypical American grocery-shopping experience.

"The general person's food experience is being driven by underpaid, imported labor, (a situation) that is completely unethical. And we don't really have structures around that to resolve that issue," he said.

If more local farmers can produce more crops, then perhaps local produce can account for a much greater percentage of the food Americans consume, Jones said.

"There's a fundamental scaling problem that we need to solve here," he said. "My argument is I don't want more farmhands in the world;I want more farmers."

By automating the back-breaking and monotonous parts of farming, robots could help to support the local food movement as it looks for ways to expand beyond the saturated farmer's market distribution model, he added.

"We don't have enough farms operating in large-enough scale that canreach enough people to make the local food movement work, and I think that is something the local food movement is trying to grapple with," he said. "There is a shift going on right now where the local food movement is starting to identify that it has mostly been based off of this mostly bucolic idea of farming, that it's a beautiful past-time kind of thing. And it's just not. It's a business, like anything else, and it's arguably a lot like manufacturing, where you've got to do a lot of the same thing all the time, and you've got to get it out to people on time and with high quality. Those are the pressures people who actually get into farming start to face."

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Jones was quick to point out that Farmhand Automation isn't the only company building robots to help farmers grow their crops. And he's not entirely sure what solution or solutions may ultimately work for small and mid-sized farms. But he said he's happy to be pushing in a promising direction.

Those interested in contacting the team or leaning more can visitFarmhandAutomation.com.

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Farmhand Automation: How Maine ag-tech startup hopes to empower local farmers with robots - Seacoastonline.com