December 28, 2017

San Francisco-based FarmWise has raised $5.7 million in seed funding through a round led by venture fund Playground, and backed by Felicis Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, and Valley Oak Investments. The company also announced that Bruce Leak, the co-founder of WebTV and investor of QuickTime, will be joining its Board of Directors.

Founded in 2016 by CEO Sebastien Boyer and CTO Thomas Palomares, FarmWise manufactures adaptive farm machinery that employs AI, computer vision, and deep learning to effectively and precisely weed and thin vegetable crops, enabling farmers to increase yields while reducing herbicide use. And with the integration of machine learning algorithms, FarmWise’s machines are able to adjust to learn additional farming tasks over time.

“At FarmWise, our mission is to work with farmers to increase their productivity, grow healthier crops, and make food production more economically and environmentally sustainable,” said Boyer.

Concurrent to its announced funding, FarmWise also announced the finalization of its first pilot contracts with large scale vegetable growers in California. Upon the successful completion of the pilot program, the company plans to commercially launch their first weeders next year.

“Demand for organic food has been growing 10 percent year-over-year for the last ten years,” said Boyer. “This funding will help us bring one of the first fully autonomous solutions in U.S. farms to the market next year and allow us to help farmers be more efficient and engage in more sustainable farming.”

Labor Pains

Increasing crop yields, reducing inputs and their costs, and combating climate change are all weighty considerations when developing agtech solutions for agricultural production, however, scarcity of labor is also a more nebulous but critical pain point in the food production process.

During the  GAI AgTech Week 2017 conference, a panel entitled How Can Agtech Tackle the Farm Labor Crisis? including Jeffrey Steen, partner with Kachina LLC & Ecosa Opportunities; Alan Boyce, executive chairman of the Materra Farming Company; Jacob Carter, founder and CEO of Tellus Partners; and Daniel Rothrock, controller of Piepel Premium Fruit, discussed the labor landscape in the ag sector and how agtech is working to alleviate the challenges and address the issues.

Farm labor is getting scarcer and more expensive than ever, noted Steen, who stated that demographic shifts in both Mexico and the U.S. are pointing to an expected outflow of labor back to Mexico. This shift is already being reflected in the numbers, as the number of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. has declined from 6.9 million in 2007 to 5.6 million in 2016. On the ground, this scenario resulted in Driscoll’s having to abandon 20 percent of their berries in 2015 and 2016 due to a shortage of labor.

Further, the available undocumented farm labor force in the U.S. would historically travel to follow the harvests of various crops up or down the West Coast. Today, less and less workers are willing to migrate due to fear of arrest and deportation.

Challenges for farming operations are not only connected with securing sufficient labor forces, but paying them. Rothrock explained that Piepel Premium Fruit spends about $10,000 per acre on labor – 60 percent of which is dedicated to harvest. The company has seen a 30 percent increase in wages in the past three years and is facing another 20 percent increase by 2020.

The intersection of climbing demand for organic produce, scarcity of labor, and rising costs of production is where agtech technologies such as those developed by startups such as FarmWise can play a critical role for the $17 billion U.S. vegetable farming sector.

This round of funding will be used by the company to expand its engineering team, and to fund the deployment of their first autonomous machines on some of the largest vegetable farms in the country.

-Lynda Kiernan