How Indiana-Based Terra Force is Using AI to Harvest Watermelons, Pumpkins
Mike Jacob, Founder of Terra Force, which is an agtech company based in Vincennes, Indiana that uses AI and robotics to harvest watermelons and pumpkins. Photo: C.J. Miller / Hoosier Ag Today.
You’ve been hearing a lot lately about AI and how the technology can be used to advance the ag industry. But there’s a new ag company that’s based in Vincennes called Terra Force that’s already using AI to harvest watermelons and pumpkins.
“Without AI this wouldn’t really be possible,” says Mike Jacob, Founder of Terra Force, who spoke with Hoosier Ag Today during the recent AgriNovus Indiana QUADRANT event at VisionLoft Stutz in Indianapolis.
Jacob’s company has developed a robotic harvester that uses AI to identify whether watermelons and pumpkins are ripe and ready for harvesting. Then, the AI technology is used to carefully pick the fruits with very little human oversight.
“We’re solving farmers’ most severe problem in melon production and that’s labor,” he says. “Labor is hard to get, plus labor is expensive. It was conversations with growers—before this company even existed—that really brought it into existence and got it off the ground.”
Jacob says the robotic AI harvesters can also be used for more than just harvesting.
“The other cool thing we can do with the machine in its current configuration is we can conceivably plant the live plants at the beginning of the season,” he says. “Right now, that’s pretty labor-intensive because it’s done by hand. But, we can use these same robotic arms with different end effectors to grasp the plants and plants them into the ground.”
Plus, without the embedded costs of having to use large farm labor teams, Jacob says that Terra Force could have a significant impact on the U.S. watermelon and pumpkin industries.
“[Our company and technology] are going to make U.S. fruit more competitive with import fruit,” says Jacob. “If you look at the import trends for melons over the past 10-20 years, all the growth has been captured by imports. Domestic production is flat to slightly down. That’s because we couldn’t compete on price until now.”
Terra Force says they can reduce labor expenses by $690 an acre
He adds that Terra Force is also working on using AI to develop harvesters for other specialty crops—such as tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers.
“Some of the recent developments that have enabled this are that the use of Deployable AI, or Edge AI, that we can have out in the field without an internet connection determining, ‘What is a watermelon? What’s not a watermelon? What’s ripe? What’s not ripe?’ and how the robot should travel to get to the melon and get it back up into the machine.”
To learn more about Indiana-based Terra Force, visit TerraForce.ai.
CLICK BELOW to hear C.J. Miller’s radio news report on Terra Force for Hoosier Ag Today.