Growers spend US$500,000 a year on automation

Growers are now spending an average of US$500,000 a year on automation in response to the persistent ag labor shortage, according to the Specialty Crop Automation Report released recently and commissioned by Western Growers (WG). The Specialty Crop Automation Report is an ongoing resource meant to strategically guide and inform innovators and growers to advance automation with speed and precision and address the pressing need to provide the specialty crop industry with solutions to workforce constraints.

This is the second year the Specialty Crop Automation Report has been released by WG in collaboration with consultants at Roland Berger. The report, which tracks and measures industry progress in harvest automation across the fresh produce industry, is part of WG’s Global Harvest Automation Initiative, which aims to accelerate ag automation by 50% in 10 years.

“This year’s report takes a deep dive into some new areas: The European market, Controlled Environment Agriculture, and the innovator’s side of automation,” said Walt Duflock, Vice President of Innovation at WG. “We found progress from a fundraising and traction perspective in key areas like weeding, spraying and harvest assist – and less progress in other key areas, notably harvest.”

Among the report’s findings, around 70% of participating growers indicated that they had invested in automation in 2022, with an average annual spend of US$450,000-US$500,000 per grower. This shows a considerable increase since last year when average investments in automation were around US$350,000 to US$400,000 per grower per year.

Most progress was made in the weeding and harvest assist segments; market-ready solutions are able to meet grower economic targets and alleviate key challenges, such as lack of labor availability. Growers reported ROIs for weeding solutions of less than one to two years depending on the type of crop and technology used.

The report also revealed that growers want more trained agtech personnel, with 50% indicating that they had internal employees who dedicated the majority of their time to the integration of automation investments. This suggests that the process of elevating and upskilling the agriculture workforce is well underway.

The time it takes to build automation solutions is also getting shorter and the costs are getting smaller thanks to overall advances in robotics and non-agriculture fields that benefit agtech startups, as well as the increasing talent pool that agtech startups are able to add to their teams.

The Specialty Crop Automation Report is available for download by clicking here