Strawberries are the most popular berry in the U.S. for both consumers and farmers alike. They’re also some of the most pesticide-reliant fruits and consistently top the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list of the most contaminated produce.
San Luis Obispo, California-based TRIC Robotics thinks it can help strawberry farmers reduce chemical use with the help of UV light and robots.
The startup built a fleet of robots that use UV-C light, a form of ultraviolet light that is largely blocked by the earth’s atmosphere, to kill bacteria and damage pest populations. The tractor-sized autonomous robots can treat up to 100 acres and also use vacuums designed to suck up bug residue without hurting crops.
The company runs its robots at farms overnight as a service, as opposed to selling them directly to farmers, because, while harder to scale, this model seemed like the right one to start getting traction quickly, Adam Stager, the co-founder and CEO of TRIC, told TechCrunch.
“We worked a lot with the farmers to understand the right way to launch the technology and what was the right business model,” Stager said. “We found out that a lot of the farmers pay for pest disease control as a service, so they have a company come in and do the sprays. And what we’ve been doing is just replacing that as a service model.”
