ADVERTISEMENT

Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad

California’s grow houses are making use of applied intelligence and robotics to cultivate the time- and labor-intensive greens.

Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad
An employee checks on a head of romaine lettuce at a company’s plant for cultivating vegetables in Tokyo, Japan. (Photographer: Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Your next salad might include leafy greens grown by robots in California greenhouses. About 75 percent of the lettuce farmed in the U.S. comes from that state’s Central Coast and San Joaquin Valley. Cultivating it requires warm temperatures, not too much rain, and lots of time and labor. Startups such as Iron Ox, a maker of agricultural robots, and big players such as John Deere are investing in artificial intelligence to raise produce more efficiently.

At Iron Ox’s fully robotic grow house in San Carlos, Calif., an autonomous robot plants, cares for, and harvests crops.

Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad
Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad
Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad
Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad
Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad
Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.