FoA 416: Robotic Mushroom Harvesting with Sean O'Connor of 4AG Robotics

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4AG Robotics: 4ag.ai/
As you heard a bit about in last weeks episode, mushrooms are an incredible indoor crop with a ton of advantages and potential. But they are also extremely labor intensive.
“When you have a crop that doubles in size every 24 hours, you're often picking mushrooms at the end of the shift because you know that they'll start colliding with other mushrooms or their caps will open up by the next morning. So you pick them too quickly. Whereas if you know, I can come back in three hours and pick that, you'll gain the extra yield and weight that'll come with it. A robot is, is able to do that, that you know, shift labor can't accommodate.”
Sean O’Connor and the team at 4AG Robotics are bringing automation to this industry. But they’re not the first to have this idea, which means they have to work a bit harder to gain farmers’ trust.
“Decades of people saying that we're gonna solve harvesting through automation, much like the rest of agriculture as well, and decades of people being wrong. So that barrier for acceptance of an MVP is very low, and you gotta have something that truly adds value to them from day one.”
Today is not only an education in mushroom farming, but a candid look on what it takes to bring technology to an established industry. Sean O’Connor of 4AG Robotics on today’s Future of Agriculture podcast.