What AgTech founders get wrong about ROI

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0:40What's up, everybody? Welcome in episode 268 of the Robot Report podcast. I'm Steve Crow, executive editor of the Robot Report bonus episode, special Halloween edition episode of the podcast. Happy Halloween, everybody. joined as always by Mike Oitzman, senior editor of our robotics group. Mike, Halloween, are you in? You're out? What are you doing? I'm in and out. I guess the point being that I'm not dressing up, but it's definitely, you know, our neighborhood, we live in a rural community and we have a little hunter home development that a lot of those kids that live in the outskirts in the rural parts, they sort of come to our development as a place to park the car and walk the neighborhood.

1:20So we do You get a pretty heavy Halloween attendance. It might be dampened a bit because it's supposed to rain tomorrow. We have a similar development. I live in western Massachusetts. It sounds like maybe a similar situation where there's not a lot of sidewalks in the town that I live in. The street I live on, we may get two kids that trick-or-treat. There's not a lot of kids in the neighborhood, but it's not really an accessible neighborhood. So there's this one neighborhood in town where everybody goes to. And these poor people, like we always talk about how much money these people must spend in candy every Halloween.

2:00And these people spend a couple hundred bucks every year on candy for the kids. So what's the over under? Over a hundred bucks on candy? What are you guys spending? Under. Yeah. When we're done, we're done. We'll just turn off the light and be done with it. There you go. Yeah, well, it is a fun, you know, for me, I got the three little kids. So it is still pretty fun. But a great show for you today, as always, on the show is Connie Bowen, VC at Farmhand Ventures. Mike, what are we going to hear from this conversation later on in the show? Yeah, I met Connie at UC Davis demo day for Agrobot Robotics earlier this fall.

2:38And she was also a recent panelist on our Agrobotics webinar last month. Connie's an ag tech investor. She had experience growing up on a farm. So she understands the economics of the farm where growers struggle and where the opportunities exist for new technology. So we're going to learn about her investing thesis and how she's helping guide the founders in her fund to success. Awesome. So we'll play that a little bit later on in the show. We'll talk about the news of the week. And there's some breaking news as we were in the green room here, which we'll get to momentarily. But we've moved on from Robotics Summit West, a.k.a.

3:13Robo Business, Mike. And we're now turning our attention to the Robotics Summit in Boston, June 2nd and 3rd, 2027. So plenty of time to get involved in the show. But this is our flagship robotics development event where we focus on all things, technologies that go into a robot and make it able to do its job or job. So we're looking for sponsors. We're looking for speakers. We're looking for partners of all sorts. So we're going to have over 5 ,000 people at this show, over 250 exhibitors. Again, our call for speakers is now open. You can find it at the robot report. You can head to roboticsummit.com and find the form there.

3:51We'll obviously include the link in the show notes here as well. But we're looking for experts who have developed and scaled robots. What are the tech challenges that you experienced in doing that? How did you overcome those technology challenges? so this is a great show this is I think the eighth year that we've done this show and it's grown pretty quickly so again over 5 ,000 people over 250 exhibitors again get involved now head to roboticssummit.com if you want to get involved or reach out to any of us here at the robot report it will help you get set in the right direction but again robotics summit east coming June 2nd and 3rd 2027 in Boston all right on to the news of the week and we have you covered with all the latest news and information with our network of websites.

4:35You can check us out at The Robot Report in Automated Warehouse. Make sure you follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and all the social platforms. Make sure you sign up for our weekly newsletters as that's the best way to never miss what's going on in the global robotics industry. Some good news, Mike, earlier this week for the North American robotic orders numbers. These are released by our friends over at A3 every quarter, So it released its Q3 data for North American robot orders and a pretty big one. Mike, what's the headline here? Yeah, well, according to the report, orders are up 24.8 % in units year over year.

5:12North American companies ordered just south of 11 ,000 robots worth over about$723 million. And revenue was up even more, 26.1%. And again, this tracks primarily industrial robots and cobots. Doesn't include mobile robots and, you know, humanoids at all. So you just got to go with that caveat. You know, but it says it's the strongest quarter of 2026 so far. So we'll have to see how the year ends. I did. And we'll talk about Digit from Agility Robotics later on. But I thought it was interesting. Did you see this yesterday when A3 released this, the cover graphic that they used had Digit on it? And I was like, wait a minute.

5:58I don't think they're tracking humanoids in these numbers. And if they are, as we'll talk about here shortly, it's certainly not enough of them out there to really make any sort of difference in this. Right. But so, again, as you just said, strongest quarter of 2026 so far and pushes the year to date totals up, too. Right. Yeah. So through the first nine months, it looks like we're at about twenty nine thousand robots. It's worth about$1.89 billion. I guess that's up about 9.6 % in units and 13.3 % in value over the same period last year. And, you know, remember the first half of the year was pretty flat.

6:36So Q3, I guess, has done a lot of lifting for the year. Yeah. So A3, they do a great job of breaking down the different verticals, the different applications that make up those numbers, right? But the one detail that jumped out to me, and we've talked about this a little bit, is automotive, right? Automotive for so long has been the backbone of the industrial robotics industry, but it's not one story anymore, right? No, it's a split. And automotive component orders climbed 90.4%, which is nearly double. And meanwhile, automotive OEM orders, which were down in the first half of the year, finally turned positive in Q3 with a 7.5 % gain.

7:16So, So, you know, again, positive trends for the year. Yeah. And where do the OEMs go from here? I mean, a positive trend, but certainly not out of – they're not out of the woods just yet. No. And, you know, 17 % below last year through the first nine months. But, you know, Q3s still remains a good sign. Doesn't erase the early first half of the year. And looks like suppliers were carrying the automotive side right now. So again, I just mentioned this, but when we've written about this a lot, we talk about this a lot and the numbers, the last number of years have obviously included markets that are outside of just automotive, which has been an important growth development for the robotics industry.

8:00But what are some of the applications outside of automotive that are important to know here? Yeah, I think the other ones, and we've talked about the investment that's going on here in semiconductors. So semiconductors and electronics and life sciences all showed positive gains. And as A3 tied the semiconductor and electronic strength to the continued chip, US chip manufacturing investment. So that continues to pump life into the segments of the market. Cobots also had a big quarter. When did A3 start tracking cobot orders? That was not that long ago. Maybe a year ago, if that? I don't know. That's a good question.

8:39Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. So this is a new development from them. But according to A3, cobot orders rose about 56 % in units to 1 ,800 plus cobots worth about$64 million. It's about 17 % of all robots ordered in the quarter, which to me is kind of mind-blowing. And year-to-date, over 4 ,600 cobots have been sold. That's about$180 million or 16 % of all industrial robots sold here in North America. Teradyne Robotics, which owns Universal Robots, they just recently released its Q3 quarterly earnings. I think it was$96 million. So a big chunk of that comes from universal robots, I would imagine.

9:27But Alex Ciccani at A3, Mike, also made a good point about what the growth looks like. Yeah, I think his big message there in the end of the report was about the diversification. So the growth is spread across industries and applications, and that really provides a healthier signal for the entire market. But at the end of the day, Steve, on my stock app, I sort of track. we've got several companies now that are public in the robotics sector. So I have a sort of a robotics segment. Unfortunately, it's been all red for the last couple of weeks. So the most recent signals in the year, and certainly with the election happening next week, all the markets are down.

10:06So while the numbers from Q3 showed positive direction in terms of investments, we're going to hit a little bit of that here in a bit. The market's sort of down at the moment. Yeah. So a lot's going on in the world that affects all this kind of stuff. Right. But overall, a strong quarter for robot orders in North America, a decent split in automotive orders. Cobots are climbing. So a more diversified market. So we'll keep an eye on how Q4 holds up. But any final thoughts? Yeah, well, I think, you know, again, the other thing they mentioned that the manufacturing PMI came in at 54.5, which is the ninth straight month of expansion.

10:48So, again, the underlying market reshoring. And, you know, a lot of the conversations I've had, we got some interviews coming up in the next couple of weeks with folks on that side of the fence. Just talking positively about where the growth is going for their business, for their robotics. So we'll keep tracking this. Yep. And again, if you missed the details of the robot orders, we have complete coverage at therobotreport.com. And we'll make sure to include the link here in the show notes. All right, moving forward. And this broke while we were just about to hit the record button on this episode of the podcast.

11:24We were going to talk a lot about Agility Robotics, who was very gracious in speaking at RoboBusiness last week, Mike Pross and Jonathan and a whole team of folks from Agility We're at the show. They announced a new customer last week, right? Agco, an agricultural company earlier this week announced an expanded partnership with GXO Logistics, which is, of course, the first company that deployed Digit a couple of years ago. I think it was 2023. But this broke while we were about to hit to record is that they've actually set the date for the IPO, right? The SPAC with Churchill Capital Corporation.

12:04So again, not a traditional IPO. And the interesting number here is really the financial aspect of it, right? And again, Mike and I are not financial advisors, experts, all the rest of it. So we're just workshopping this as we see this. But again, when the SPAC was originally announced earlier this year, the SPAC was expected to provide more than$620 million of gross proceeds. So$620 million in capital to agility,$420 million of that, which was to come from Churchill Capital's trust account. So these are people who have put money into a trust account from Churchill Capital. I believe it's been earning interest between the time they put that money in and the time that they make a decision of who to partner with on the SPAC.

12:54So directly from the trust, Agility was supposed to raise, they were hoping to raise$424 million. That was the original number that they shared on the 13th of October, I believe. So again, this just dropped moments ago. And that number has dropped from$424 million to they now expect$164 million to be raised from Churchill Capital trust owners. That's a$260 million drop or change of that's down 61%, which is crazy. The pipe from Foxconn was$200 million. They're saying it's now going to be$201 million. So that's slightly up. And then they've also said that they've, shortly after this merger with Churchill Capital was announced, that they raised equity round of another$100 million.

13:47So overall, they were expected to raise more than$620 million. They are now saying it will be$465 million, which is down$159 million or 25%. And we wrote about this when this was first announced. You know, SPACs have not been kind to robotics companies and other kinds of technology developers. But I remember writing saying, you know, that$620 million number doesn't really matter, right? What we really need to see is what does that number end up at when the IPO happens and a 25 % drop. Again, this is where my financial knowledge kind of goes out the window, Mike, but that can't be a great vote of confidence, I don't think, right?

14:36So since between the time the SPAC was announced and now, of course, Digit V5 has been unveiled. It is not out yet, but they've shown it. They've talked a lot about how many orders are in the pipeline for Digit V. I think they're throwing out$300 million as the number of orders that they have waiting in the wings for whenever Digit V is ready. They released revenue numbers, which were not great,$1.8 million in 2025. that would be no different for any other industrial humanoid company on the planet, right? These things are not at the point yet where they're being scaled. But all that being said, what's your reaction to this?

15:16Again, I don't think it's a huge vote of confidence in this. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, and I think the folks at Agility probably a little bit concerned as well about that. But, you know, at the end of the day, they need the money to continue operating, right? I think as we've seen with many of the other humanoid developers, you know, trying to acquire a big war chest, they've got some more work to do to get this to volume. Some of the research that I found quickly in terms of pulling this together, a notation from CFO Michael Beer, he said the bill of materials is roughly about$150 ,000 per robot at launch volumes, right?

16:02Around 1 ,000 units a year. But it could fall to maybe$30 ,000 once they get to 10 ,000 units a year. So, you know, that's the product path that they've got to get on to make this profitable for them. And until then, you know, I don't know what the street price is going to be for an agility digit five. But it may be that they're, again, like I said, they're going to be strapping, taping$100 bills to these robots for a while until they can get the volumes up. And that's true for every humanoid manufacturer, right? The thing that they have prepared for, they've got the RoboFab up in Oregon. It's set up to build 10 ,000 units or it's designed for a 10 ,000 unit production.

16:55We've heard the same thing from Tesla. Tesla is busy building their fab and converting the automotive facility in Fremont to produce only humanoid robots. We know figures doing the same thing. So, you know, these companies have to build for the production and then it's, you know, start burning cash until, you know, the orders come through. So it's going to be, you know, an interesting year ahead for Digit and the rest of the humanoid companies as they, you know, look for customers and, you know, try to reach these production levels that, you know, they can become profitable at some point in the future.

17:34Until then, they're going to be burning cash. So they've got a pile of cash here. It's now a race to reach the sales numbers they need. Yeah. So I think the valuation for agility has not changed from what I understand. So it's still at$2.5 billion. But again, a lot could still change. You know, again, from these numbers, from our understanding, right, about 61 % of that trust was redeemed by the shareholders. Right. That can still change until November 2nd. Right. So a couple more days. Yeah. A couple of a few more days. Until Monday. So again, the$164 million that they still have in the SPAC trust can still move one way or another, from my understanding.

18:27So, again, still still need to keep an eye on that. But it sounds like, you know, they're ready to go public next week. So there's a vote, I think, on November 4th and then they go public on the 5th. Right. So we'll we'll have to see. But yeah, again, I don't want to pretend that any other industrial humanoid company, at least in the United States, is in any different of a position than this. So some of them might have more money. Figure might have more money. Persona AI might have more money. And we love all these folks. Incredible progress that they're making on the humanoid front. But none of these companies are deploying these at any sort of remote scale.

19:09So I think you're right. who has the most money at the end of the day, who has the best partnerships. And again, agility is moving quickly. They had the announcement last week with Nilebolt, which is this fast battery charging company, which we came across a couple of years ago. I think we gave them, or maybe this year, gave them an RVR50 award. Eugene and I actually first came across them at a Symbotic site. I hope it's okay to say this, but Symbotic uses the Nilebolt charging technology and all of it. the mobile robots that are within the symbiotic ASRS system. So that's potentially super helpful to Digit's productivity.

19:50But again, it's just where do they go from here, right? They announced this expanded partnership with GXL Logistics, which is a great partner for all things robotics and automation in the logistics business, right? Where they're looking to expand the partnership with Digit in the reach of Digit, right? But at the same time that they're announcing this partnership, you go back a few months and Patrick Kelleher, I think he's the CEO of GXO. He said they've done 45 pilots on humanoids so far. We have an additional pilot launching in Europe very shortly. We have not achieved ROI on humanoids yet. I think we're a couple of years away from that.

20:30But we're seeing such great progress with our partners around the efficacy of that technology and the application opportunities that it has in the warehouse environment. So I know GXO has tested wheeled platforms as well as legged platforms, but it's just not ready yet is the moral of the story. And I think you're right. It's a race to survival of the fittest. Who can survive? Who can have the most money until some sort of economic scale? can be reached. So it's going to be an interesting race to watch happen here in the next year. Yeah. And there's another interesting thing to watch before we move on on the humanoid race is, I don't know if you caught this this week, there is a report out there from KED Global.

21:17This is a Korean news publication. It's actually the Korea Economic Daily. They have a report out there about Boston Dynamics supply chain for Atlas is going all Korean, which makes sense, Hyundai Korean company. But again, if you, I don't want to share too many details of it, you can go, it's behind the paywall, but you can go check out other media outlets have written about this, but they're basically telling their supply chain to try to ramp up for a 10 ,000 unit order for Atlas in the not too distant future. So, you know, are they getting Atlas to a point where, again, they're starting to ramp up production deployments within Hyundai facilities?

22:03Maybe it's the Metaplant down in Georgia. Maybe it's other places around the country, around the world. But it sounds like Boston Dynamics is trying to help prepare its partners to get them lined up for all the different pieces that they need to go into Atlas covering 10 ,000 units. So again, maybe marking a step toward commercial production of the Atlas humanoids. So a lot going on in there and humanoids in general. So we'll continue to watch all that. Yeah, I guess I would come back to Tesla as one last final example here. Out of all of the companies, they at least have a captive customer in their internal automotive manufacturing that they can deploy without the economic ROI in the short term, right?

22:47I mean, they can say, we're going to deploy these things. We're going to deploy thousands of these things because that's what we believe in without the necessary payback until they reach the volume that they need to make them affordable. So again, we don't get much out of them because it's all internal at the moment, right? So we'll have to learn and follow how that evolves in the future. Do they have any money over at Tesla? Yeah. Well, they're making money somewhere. Yeah. I think they're interesting times. So we'll continue to follow that. And again, we'll keep an eye on the SPAC next week, obviously.

23:26All right. And again, to stay up to date with what's going on in the global robotics industry, make sure you check out our websites, The Robot Report and Automated Warehouse. Make sure you follow us on social media. Make sure you sign up for our weekly newsletters so you never miss a beat. All right. On to the featured interview now, Mike, a conversation with Connie Brown, general partner at Farmhand Ventures, set this up for us. Yeah. So they're an impact investment firm backing technology that makes work in agriculture better for the people who do it. Connie started in venture capital at the Yield Lab and then spent years managing farmland in Oregon.

23:59So she's an experienced farmer, a grower. She ran blueberry, hazelnut, and hemp operations. And, you know, her investments in the fund include L5 Automation, which is a very interesting, you know, strawberry harvesting robot, and also Scout, which is, you know, a yield management software started by an old buddy of mine. So I've been following them closely. And you might, if you didn't catch the recent webinar on field robotics last month, you can go back and replay that at the Robot Report website to hear more on her philosophy. But here's what to listen for. You know, she sees labor, not technology, as the real economic driver for automation and ag.

24:43And, you know, the diligence question that she likes to ask every founder is, you know, what does the tractor driver think of your solution? So listen for that thread underneath this. And finally, listen for her guidance to farmers about what they expect for new technology and what it takes to earn their trust. So let's listen to that interview now.

25:08All right, I want to welcome Connie Bowen. She's the founding general partner for Farm Hand Ventures on the show today. Connie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Yeah. Hey, Connie, I'm glad to have you on the podcast. You joined me a couple of weeks ago on our recent webinar, which was all about field robotics for energy and construction and agriculture. And I really love your voice. I love your perspective, the seat that you hold in the industry here. So we're really excited to talk about the things that you're seeing about field robotics today, specifically in agriculture.

25:47And so those are some of the things that we'd like to talk about. So why don't we start with an introduction from your perspective. Tell us about Farmhand Ventures, why you started it, and what problems you're trying to solve. Yeah, I'm happy to. I think very, quite simply, at Farmhand Ventures, we're an impact investment firm, and we are trying to invest in solutions that make work in agriculture better. for the folks who do it. And that does maybe counter to some logic involve automation and robotics. And I can get way more in the weeds on 18 different dimensions of that. But at the end of the day, we are here to make work in agriculture better by leveraging technology.

26:37Great. I think that's an important element of where robotics and automation is going in agriculture today. And so, you know, what are some of the things in your experience? I know you've come from a farming background a bit. What have you seen in the field that convinced you that funding this part of the market would be interesting and important? Yeah. To kind of speed through my background, I started in the VC side of the world, employee number two at the Yield Lab, which is now one of the most active agri-food tech global venture capital firms, or really Federation of Firms, and left VC, though, to spend time in farmland investment and management.

27:25And so lived in Oregon, was very involved in managing some of our blueberry, hazelnut, and hemp properties out in the Limit Valley. And I have a whole bunch of stories, you know, from standing at the bottom of the eight foot hole that I dug to fix our irrigation tech investment. And I'm air quoting that for podcast listeners, all the way through to, you know, managing 80 to 100 field workers on blueberry harvest or figuring out what the heck, this was 2018, the first year hemp was legal. So figuring out what the heck hemp harvest even looked like and actually doing that work alongside crew members.

28:08It became incredibly obvious to me while I was out there in the field that labor is the single biggest pain point from a farm management perspective. Frequently, it is the largest economic, like it is the largest line item, spend, cost on pretty much everything that you eat, farm operation. But even where it's not the largest economic pain point, it is the biggest emotional behavioral pain point that either enables you to change and motivates you to adopt a new practice or technology because it's somehow making managing your people easier, or it inhibits you from even considering doing anything differently.

28:55Connie Bowen: You were talking about the labor as a pain point, and obviously automation is part of the future of work in agriculture. But when you look at it from the farm workers' perspective, rather than the grower or the investor perspective, what does that mean? What does that future with automation look like? Short answer is it's complicated. And you kind of have to go case by case on this. One of the things, and we've written and published a white paper with UC Merced on this. I do a lot of work with a researcher named Ann Visser at UC Davis on this kind of intersection of farmers, farm workers, and technology.

29:39And in almost every, and I focus at Farmhand, Farmhand Ventures, we focus on really US, a little bit of Canada, Mexico, but more developed agricultural economies. And in all of these developing agricultural economy contexts, we rely on primarily an immigrant population who has typically less than full citizenship rights to do most of the manual labor. And in some contexts, that is defined through Department of Labor or Department of Labor equivalents as skilled work. And in other contexts like the US, it's actually not defined as skilled work. And that has a lot of ramifications for how I think we, as folks who don't touch ag, think about it.

30:30But I'm here to tell you, having worked on and managed hundreds of farm workers, the difference between the top performer and the bottom performer is often like 5x. And that is a huge difference in a low margin industry like agriculture. What I'm saying is farm work is skilled. And oftentimes, we have this issue where most Americans have no exposure to agriculture. Most folks in tech are city folk. And this is an increasingly big problem. We've got like fewer than 1 % of Americans who have any exposure to agricultural work. So of course, it is harder to innovate well for something you don't know about.

31:18And I think we've gotten a little bit better in ag tech about saying, you got to talk to a farmer. Please don't be designing something in Silicon Valley and then telling a farmer that you've fixed his farm. That's really not a good way to go. I call it tech bros, fixing farms. doesn't work don't do it not a thing I want to fund um but we take that a step further because you've usually got someone who may or may not even speak the same language as the folks the hundreds of folks who are actually doing the day in day out work of harvest weeding pruning thinning there's a lot of complex tasks in cultivating especially food crops.

32:02And those folks who do that work really understand it best. And they're almost never part of the technology product design process. And they're also the people who most have to interface with that technology. So you can see how that might become a problem for product design and integration.

32:24Connie Bowen: Full disclosure, I'm a city slicker. I grew up in New York, but I didn't Mary is someone who grew up on a dairy farm, so I've had a little more exposure, perhaps, but I definitely get your point there is that you want to understand what's actually happening in the field. Can you give an example of where a technology can make that kind of work better and not just faster? Because we think about throughput, we think about productivity, but as you said, the tasks that need to be done in the field are pretty complex. And there's a reason why humans have been doing it for thousands of years. Yeah, that's a better, but not faster is an interesting point.

33:06I'm almost going to invert that if that's okay, because I think we have more of that in ag right now. I would like to see more of what you're talking about, which is better, but not faster. But so I farm blueberries, right? Highbush blueberries, Oregon, you run two or three harvests a season usually. And usually you do like the first two or three are manual harvest. And the last one is machine harvest. So there's these Oxbow is like the maker usually of this equipment. They're like combs kind of that spin around and knock the berries off and then it kind of catches them. And it's, you know, way more costly to manually harvest berries however you generally are harvesting a higher quality berry and then using that last harvest or the shaker harvest as kind of a juice berry harvest where you're getting a much lower price per pound berry picked um and ultimately all this comes down to economics um so and different crops of different levels of urgency and strawberries is always one that is held up as like you have to harvest strawberries at least every three days or else if you and you have to harvest the bad berries too because if you leave ripe berries in the field you will get basically moisture buildup disease buildup and you'll ruin the crop and it's kind of a it's a longer season where you're trying to harvest ideally every day or two realistically today every two or three days just because of labor scarcity availability.

34:41And so in the context of blueberry harvesting, right, like we have to some degree automated blueberry harvest. We can do it, but it's way faster. But it's also resulting in a lower quality berry for the most part. And it makes sense in certain economics. There's a place for that. But then taking it over to the way and we're invested in the strawberry harvest automation company, L5 automation, taking it over to the strawberry side, there is an appetite due to the lack of available labor and due to policy in many states now, a couple of states, but the agricultural production states that matter a lot.

35:30Farm workers used to be exempt, overtime exempt, meaning they could work 40 plus over 40 hours a week and not be compensated overtime. That had been a carve out in U.S. law for like a very long time. And some states have said, hey, no, that's not OK. You have to pay farm workers time and a half. and while you can understand that the intent of that policy was to obviously improve farmworker cost of living etc etc give just wages the flip side of that is farmers can't afford to pay that and farm work is inherently seasonal strawberry harvest doesn't last all year long it's very intense when it's intense and then it's then you're off for a little while and so that's had an impact basically on the willingness of strawberry farm operators to pay for and be interested in robotic harvesters that are a little less good than people because there actually aren't enough people.

36:37That means by a little less good, I mean damaging the berry a little bit more and harvesting a little bit more slowly. And I don't think anyone is quite there, even in the the there's like a little bit less good not a lot less good um is the range uh but you're seeing that more and more because there's just so many pressures on labor that it's gonna shift and actually you can see this if you pay attention to blueberries in the supermarket right now this past season in particular you either got those jumbos those expensive ones that like fruitist and Driscoll's have the better blues. Or if you're just getting the normal pint ones, they're smaller than they've been.

37:21That's because they're shaker harvest.

37:22Connie Bowen: And they go bad fastener. I know that for a fact. But it's like, if the economics mandate that we have to do this less good version of harvesting, then that's what we have to do. But that's why we're trying to invest in better solutions than that so we can still have good blueberries yeah well let's let's talk about that investment profile and and your thesis for investment here you've shared a little bit of that in terms of the economics as as one of the leading um perspectives of why automate so so tell us a little bit about your investment thesis for for agrobotics and automation yeah so in general we We don't exclusively invest in agrobotics, but we are much more tolerant of agrobotics and hardware investment, I think, than your average investor.

38:14And we also, we do some venture investing, but we also do some non-venture investing because in agriculture over the past 10 to 15 years that ag tech has been a thing that exists, we've had one almost billion dollar exit. That's Climate Corp to Monsanto 2013. And we're really reliant on M &A for exits. And that's particularly problematic in the context of specialty crops, which are fruit, veg, nuts. Because most of the incumbent companies, if you look at in robotics, you're going to look at John Deere, Kubota, CNH, CHS. And so like those companies are more focused on row crops, corn, beans, wheat, that are already pretty well automated, actually.

39:10We've invested a ton on kind of every piece of the input seed, chem, equipment on corn and bean productivity. And like we're kind of killing it there to some degree to the point where it's actually problematic. and my family owns a farm in Iowa too and we grow corn and beans like everyone else in Iowa. So I feel this acutely. That's actually, we actually have too much corn and beans and that actually really messes with the economics of farming those things. But I am more interested in farm inventors at how do we make it more affordable and accessible to produce fruit and veg nut in a greater variety of places.

39:49And so when we're looking at those investments, That gets hard because if we're dependent upon M &A as our exit pathway, that technology is probably going to get repurposed for RokeRox because there's more acreage there. It's a more standardized market, et cetera, et cetera. So we've had to kind of create a different way to get liquidity. So we focus on redeemable equity investment a lot in addition to venture capital. So when we look at robotics companies, either we might make an equity investment and say, okay, this L5 automation is a really, it's a two-armed hand-eye coordination kind of harvesting system.

40:31So it's very complex robotics, cutting-edge physical AI, has extensibility way beyond strawberry harvest. And so that truly venture-backable, right? It's not pure play ag. But then if we're looking at something, say, I haven't made an investment in the space yet, but I've looked quite a bit at table grape transportation, which is like the least sexy part of robotics. Like it's not very hard to move something from A to B again and again. But right now, farm workers spend like 40 percent of their time pushing 200 pound wheelbarrows of table grapes. Think about a bunch of table grapes. That's like so hard to think about harvesting automatically.

41:12We are pretty far from robots being able to do that well. But two counties in California produce 98 % of U.S. table grapes. So you've got this nice concentrated market that you can service and you can create a stupid robotic system that enables farm workers to make more money because they're paid per pound picked, enables farm operators to actually get all the grapes out of their field, also make more money, also retain the best farm workers. And you can create kind of a cash cow business that is, it's not going to be a billion dollar company, but it can be a$1 ,500 million a year revenue company.

41:56And we're making smaller investments to$50K-ish right now. We might get up to like half a million. And it's totally feasible for us to say, hey, we're going to buy equity in your company, but we're going to pre-agree that you're going to pay us back as a percentage of your revenues once you hit a certain revenue target. At a pre-agreed upon multiple, we typically target 5x. And so we have a very different kind of portfolio construction than your average, which, again, we're not a pure play VC fund, that has been designed to the realities of ag tech. But as relates to robotics, obviously, that can limit us from getting involved in some of the more cutting edge robotics plays, which to me is okay, because ag rarely gets the most cutting edge tech period, because we're a low margin industry.

42:54And that's just kind of the reality of it. You and I chatted about this, you know, off the record in the past couple of months is, you know, you see a lot of proposals, pitches, folks are pitching you. And, you know, what are some of the things that you sort of listen for, try to validate in those pitches as someone's got an idea for perspective opportunity? You know, are you really considering what the grower pain is? Because you've already talked about your experience there or the technical feasibility or the team or the return on investment. What are some of those things that you like to hear or stand out to you as you're trying to evaluate an opportunity?

43:41A little bit all of the above. But I guess I would clarify, I know enough about production agriculture to know how complex it is and to know how little I know, which is where I have really focused on developing farmer networks and farm worker networks. and sometimes pest control advisor, you know, the kind of relevant experts that are part of the system. I think we look for the usual things. We're usually the first institutional investor. Every single company we've invested in to date, we have co-invested with a major customer, at least one major customer. So that's weird, right? To be a pre-seed investor, but in every instance, but one is a regulated livestock product.

44:42So that one's pre-revenue. But again, we're co-invested with one of the top 30 CAFOs in the world. We are generally investing in post-revenue pre-seed companies, which is weird, weird place to be. And even in cases like L5, right? Like technically they've got a ways to go still in strawberries, but they designed right from the jump with Good Farms, our co-investor there, a big strawberry producer in the US and Mexico and Colombia. They figured out we're going to have to, we're going to basically be a worker. Our robot is a worker. And so we're going to get paid per pound pit. And even though our worker is for the first couple of years going to cost a ridiculous amount to maintain.

45:35We want to be able to be thinking about this product in the reality of your existing operational system. um and so i think one other really differentiating thing that we do in our due diligence is i always ask founders what farm workers think about it even if it's someone who's automating tractors for example there's a lot of retrofit kits for tractor automation there's yeah there's a lot of players in that space and i always say what does the tractor driver think um and some a lot of guys it is usually guys uh will tell me no you don't get it i'm replacing them and i will usually not invest in that company and because my point is every robot and really every piece of technology i've ever seen sucks before it's good it's quite bad actually.

46:34And in this current macroeconomic environment, I think it's really accelerated by immigration policy stuff in the US right now. But even I worked in Oregon pre-COVID. So this was true then. Birth rates, climate change, I can give a whole lecture on macroeconomic trends driving labor shortages. The TLDR is it's only going to get worse. We are going to have a labor marketplace in agriculture for decades to come, wherein there are fewer available people to do work, then there is work to be done. And so that actually means the farm worker has all the power, even though in many ways they don't. When it comes to technology adoption, if you come in to a farm operation and the farmer likes what you're doing, but you're pissing off the farm workers, I guarantee you, you will not be operating on that farm for very long.

47:33And so I am really thinking about, is this founder able to listen and understand and compensate the people whose workflow he's fundamentally changing? And if not, that's not the right fit for us.

47:53Connie Bowen: You mentioned L5 Automation. Looking at some of the other companies that you've invested in, like Scout, New West Genetics, and NutBio. Are there things that they have in common? Because you mentioned that you're looking at perhaps some different things than the conventional wisdom might suggest. Yeah. Well, I would love to flag New West in particular. So that's a leading hemp genetics company in the United States. And I have invested in a number of novel genetics companies, which is maybe crazy of me. over the years when I worked with the Yield Lab, we were in Covercrest for Viva. I did some work with Stony Creek Colors.

48:34You've got really niche ag listeners who are going to know what any of those companies are. But one of the challenges, there's way more genetic diversity than we currently produce. That's an opportunity. One of the challenges to introducing new crops is it's kind of complicated to produce crops, especially at scale. And a lot of, all of, except for hemp and specifically New West genetics varieties of hemp that I've ever worked with have required additional equipment to cultivate them. Hemp. And again, New West has hybridized hemp, which hybridized crop traits are incredibly important for agricultural yield.

49:16Basically results it's like a feminized crop so you basically end up with getting double the yield so double yield good in ag and also you can use your combine which is what every midwest farmer uses for his corn and his beans and his wheat you can just adjust the header on your combine and grow hemp and that means you have a scalable row crop and so i want to flag that because in the context of robotics, in agriculture, as we get into more complex robotics and especially crop operations, we are severely under-investing in and thinking about the importance of genetics in automation. Because we're thinking a lot about how do we design the iron and the brain to deal with this existing diverse, complex, pretty suboptimal system.

50:16But if we actually say, well, wait a minute, what if we look at the genotype and the phenotype, and that's where things start to get real complex on us, but we can breed for crops that are more easily harvestable. We don't always do that right now. We do in some crops. You see it as often you're breeding for things to be more harvestable by human pickers. But what variables change when you start to think about, and I guess at some point I was going to say this, humanoids aren't going to be the thing in fields and ag. That's not the ideal form factor for getting most tasks done in agriculture. But as that form factor shifts or kind of combines, I think there's going to be a ton of collaborative automation in the space, then how, too, should crop genetics be optimized and altered to kind of get us there faster?

51:22So that's one thing. And then, you know, I can get in the weeds on Scout and that bio, but ultimately, both are thinking about all the stakeholders and making work more attractive, whether it's in vineyards or castrating male pigs in pork operations. You can imagine that's not a pleasant job right now. Yeah, that's basically what we're thinking about throughout all of this is, are people going to be happier at work? And what we see is the good farm operators, and these are the ones who are going to weather the tough times we're having in ag right now that unfortunately I think are going to get worse for the next couple of years.

52:03Those good operations are doing, are almost looking at technology as a mechanism to ensure and retain their workforce. So, Connie, coming back to one of the other conversations that you and I have had on the sidebar in the past is some of the workflows beyond what you've already just talked about, harvesting. And I know you're always talking to the ag robot companies about the opportunities here, whether it's weeding or spraying or harvesting, what have you. where do you think that the biggest opportunity exists? And I guess to our audience who are considering, you know, whatever great ideas they have in their head at the moment, just trying to get out of you, your perspective of where you see some of the best opportunity for automation beyond what we've already talked about in the show up to this point.

53:02I think we are getting closer to real feasibility in harvest automation. If you look at almost any specialty crop organization, we've got these associations and commodity groups in agriculture, and they usually have research priorities or they were even formed for some priority. Most of the stuff in fresh fruit and veg, they've been trying to figure out automation for decades. And so we've had a lot of things come and go in space. And that's still happening, unfortunately. We're still in pretty early days, but we are getting a lot closer. So I think it is closer to the right timing for Harvest Automation.

53:53I think the companies I'm most excited about in that space are really paring down their systems to make them as low cost as possible. because one of the real challenges in ag is downtime. A lot of these cultivation tasks are like annual. And so you might only really need to use a harvesting robotics, a harvesting robot in apples for a couple of weeks. And so how do you justify having a piece of equipment that can only do one thing? And you can, you can justify it. But I'll be up in Yakima, Washington next week for FIRA. And I know plenty of growers who are totally ready to have something set for most of the year.

54:44But much better if it's cheaper, right? And that's one of the problems with harvest automation is it doesn't get used all the time. And when we talk about autonomy in factory automation, it's used every second of every day in the production of said product. But food is what's the cyclical, right? You've got to plant it. You've got to grow it. You've got to cultivate it. And then you've got to harvest it. So trying to automate that part. And plus, that's the payday for the farmer, right? They only get paid during harvest. They want to get stuff out of the field and into market as fast as possible, as we've already talked about, without damaging it.

55:20So it's a tough use case, but it's a very important use case and highly opportunistic. But again, trying to get the ROI out of that investment doesn't always work out. That's totally true. But the good news about it is like in order to get to harvest, you have to do all these other things that most people aren't thinking. Like everyone, yeah, it would be cool if you could pick an apple with your robot. But you can't do that if you can't get rid of doubles, which is like when you have two apples that squish together and that damages fruit quality often. And before that, you have to do appropriate levels of thinning.

55:54And like we've already moved almost completely away from used to be a manual hand done task and in organics, it still is mostly, but we've moved into chemical thinning, which is much less effective, but way cheaper. And so it's what the industry has kind of been forced to do for the most part. But you can think about if you want your, especially as you start to think about, okay, how can we train our system in digital twins? That would obviously be favorable to you'd get more iterations to solving in the field every time and only having a couple of cycles that you can test it. Well, in order to get all collect the data that is accurate to your system, it actually starts to really make sense to go after some of the pre harvest cultivation tasks, like thinning, like DAA, again, it varies by crop and like some of the things are the same, but the terminology is a little bit different.

56:51But I really encourage folks to look at the full kind of grow timeline and task timeline for some of these different crops. It's both true that most of the pre-harvest tasks are lower labor input. And so therefore lower available market size. But I'm really interested in companies who can earn the right to be in the field. And part of my thinking in that is we've been doing this thing in ag for the past decade plus where we've said, oh, my gosh, Precision Ag, it's coming. And tech companies go to growers with their drones and their cameras and they say, hey, pay me to collect this data. And I'm going to transform it and hopefully make it useful to you.

57:44And that hasn't really sold that well, which makes sense. And so if you can solve a problem, even if it's a small problem, and earn the right to be in the field and start to, especially in specialty crops, we don't have even per row, sometimes even per block, yield maps in most of the stuff we eat. And that's kind of crazy. And so if you can do one useful thing that is like kind of boring, technically, that earns you the right and the data to start to get to the more complex things. But you really do have to walk before you run in this space. And it is a space that really moves at the speed of trust and relationships.

58:32and so again if you can deliver on a simple thing then you start to earn the belief that you might be able to deliver on a complex thing.

58:41Connie Bowen: In terms of you mentioned doing the simple things what have you been able to learn from seeing a technology in the field that you might not have been able to get from a startup pitch because as you mentioned there's a disconnect sometimes between the two. And as someone who has worked with operators and farmers, what are they looking for or what are you looking for in terms of the operation itself? Yeah, that's a great question. And I mean, I know, Jean, you said your partner is in the dairy industry and you kind of have either been to a dairy operation or you haven't. And if you haven't, you just don't really know.

59:29And I wish I could explain that in a more eloquent way, but it is a literal, you know or you don't, what it is like to work in some of these contexts. More concretely, we at FarmHend have kind of another branch where we're not investing, where we work in partnership with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, which is extended for the state of California. So we have an industry advisory board comprised of producers of different operation types, crop types, geographies, as well as some farm labor contractors or FLCs, which are basically LLCs that farm workers work for. And that's kind of what provides a lot of the labor in the agricultural system and pest control advisors and whatnot.

1:00:22And then we run field days all across the state focused on bringing technology to growers. And everyone loves robots and equipment. So we definitely index heavy on equipment for these field days. But what we're really looking for with this, we select the companies based on industry priorities and then in close partnership with commodity board advisors and our IAB members. and we onboard these companies too and to make sure that they understand what to expect and how to engage with growers and what you can, like watching, this was never my intent when we've been doing this work with UCNR for like three or four years now.

1:01:17My intent originally was let's leverage extension to get tech to growers and kind of help modernize extension. But a really awesome thing that we realize we're also seeing is at these field days, you can watch how team leadership, regional sales folks engage with growers. And what happens at a field day oftentimes is like the biggest decision makers are quiet in the back. And like it's always like a researcher or student who's asking a lot of questions. And like every now and then you get a grower who's asking more questions. But being able to improve every time you're interacting in these situations and being able to communicate to a farmer audience or knowing whether it's someone who is at the ownership level or at the operations management level or maybe he's the irrigation manager, being able to understand and navigate that is hard.

1:02:17And it's actually really visible when you're watching someone during a 10 to 15 minute demo and their team, watching how they're able to kind of work the crowd and manage their follow up and actually do that follow up because we do keep in touch with folks and then actually do what they said they were going to do in that trial at that operation. and then check back in to make sure it's going well. That level of kind of customer handholding is really necessary in a lot of these contexts. And I don't know how to be sure that it's happening without having kind of trusted team members engaged in some pieces of that thread.

1:03:07it is incredibly important to have people on your robotics team who spend a lot of time in the geographies that you are trying to serve.

1:03:18Connie Bowen: Sounds like the relationship is just as important then as a technical demo itself. You need people who have, they may not have all of the domain expertise, but they need to really be well connected to the people that they're ultimately trying to serve. as much as having a shiny demo to show off. Exactly. And I think that's right. Like you can't do anything alone. You need a team. So like if you're a brilliant roboticist, that's awesome. Make sure you're hiring someone who is equally brilliant at communicating with your customer and that you respect them enough and can communicate well enough with them that you're not losing anything.

1:04:00Because that's, I mean, that has probably killed more agrobotics companies than anything else. And I think we often, some folks often consider farmers to be Luddites. And I think there's the opposite of that, right? They want robust products. They'll take a chance on, from my experience, and I want your perspective, they'll take a chance on anything once. But if it fails, you're gone. You don't get a second comeback on that, right? So there's sort of an interesting relationship with the farmer's expectations and what they deploy. in the production. That's a great point, Mike. I think I would, I would tweak it slightly.

1:04:37It depends how you fail on something.

1:04:40Connie Bowen: Yeah. Right. Because, and it depends what farmer you're talking to and how you're setting expectations. Because again, folks, they're, they're really innovative farmers and there are folks who are like, I'm going to wait till my neighbor gets that. And if it works for him, I'll try it. And trying to understand and navigate that, That's another kind of complex component of this. And I actually, I moderated a panel for the Farm Robotics Challenge that is let out of UCANR and the California ICAC Alliance, I think, last week or the week before with some growers. And we had the conversation about ROI.

1:05:15And all three growers, lettuce grower, strawberry grower, and dairyman slash row crop grower. And all three of them are pretty innovative guys, pretty down to play with technology companies. And in the discussion about ROI, they don't expect to have a return on investment very early. Like they've done it enough. They know that probably it's going to be bad for a couple of seasons. But if you can be honest and co-build and co-create with them, they're down. Like make it worth and make it worth their while. I often, I am really trying to, I used to work with a group called AgLaunch, which is a very interesting farmer network where farmers pool small equity stakes that they earn in companies by conducting trials at their properties.

1:06:10And when you do, when you are allowed to operate on a farmer's land, he is, there's a high opportunity cost for him, right? And so I really believe that it's important to incentivize and align incentives between yourself and kind of your co-development customer, ideally customers. And so you can do that. You can do it fast, you know, an advisory agreement, just like you would with a technical advisor. You do that with a farmer customer. No problem. That works really well. sometimes growers will invest in these companies because they want that solution and personally as an investor nothing tells me that the market risk is relatively low if it works like a farmer investing in the thing um because yeah and then i think one other point i just wanted to add mike on the importance of getting out in front of farmers something i see a lot of is an early stage company will think they've figured something awesome out.

1:07:12And maybe they have for one use case, but then they put it in front of a grower in a different context. And that grower says, whoa, if you change this a little bit, there's this huge opportunity over here. And that opportunity might be better than what they were originally going after. And so, I mean, obviously you can't do everything all at once, but being able to get that feedback and get in front of growers who are willing to give that feedback is so invaluable. And I have seen that happen countless times now.

1:07:52Connie Bowen: You mentioned earlier, obviously there's challenges with labor availability and skills and obviously immigration policy is a part of that. demographics is a big part of that as well. How much do founders need to pay attention to those macroeconomic forces and the regulatory or policy implications? Because when they're trying to address the grower's needs, there's the immediate need of dealing with the crop, but there's also this environment that you mentioned earlier, and how much should they be following that? It's a hard answer because I am the kind of person who likes to like have all the context and you can't, again, can't do everything all at once.

1:08:38It is frankly irresponsible to work in ag and not at least be aware of policy because our agricultural system is the way that it is more because of government than anything else. So you got to be at least aware. I hope that I have a newsletter. It's called Agriculture is for People. I try to pull the stuff that is most relevant to ag tech founders and do a lot of the kind of policy work behind the scenes. obviously for the companies I actually invest in, I am doing even more work there. There's a lot of, even today still, there's plenty of government grant funding available. If you understand who you need to know in alphabet soup of state and federal policy in order to unlock some of that, non-dilutive funding rocks.

1:09:35And also there are regulatory moats that can either make you or break you in this space. So I really don't, I mean, I guess you can over-invest in policy, knowledge, and awareness, and navigation. But I see much more under-investment, I guess I would say. But yeah, I guess at the very least, you should probably read my newsletter. It's free. Well, Connie, it's been great to catch up with you. I mean, you're operating in a market, as we just highlighted for the last 45 minutes, it's so many different variables that are at play in this market space from labor expectations to owner-grower expectations to all of the governmental influence that's not always easy to predict as well in the markets for the food and ag products that are produced today.

1:10:38So it's much more complex, in my view, than some of the other warehousing, logistics, manufacturing that we typically see robotics deployed in. So many different variables for a startup founder to consider as they're trying to estimate the success of a given solution. And you bring a unique perspective to this. I want to thank you for joining us today. Before we let you go, just remind folks, I met you at one of the field days, which are a great way to go see a bunch of different new technologies. That's one place folks might meet you. But how can folks reach out to you if they, again, want to pitch you or just pick your brain about the way the market is?

1:11:26You already mentioned your newsletter, but just give us a quick lead here. Yeah, Mike, thanks. And Jean, thanks for having me. It's been fun. And on the field days, we've got another field day coming up on November 5th at Kearney Rack, which is in Parley or California, like 40 minutes outside of Fresno. We've got some, we'll announce the company showcasing there probably Monday. and if you want to get in touch with us at Farmhand Ventures we like cold outreach we have a forum on our website or you can just email info at farmhandventures.com it'll go into my inbox I'm warning that I am in travel season but I will eventually check my inbox and then and yeah I just just just to kind of conclude on who we're looking for we are an impact investment firm and we are looking for technical solutions that will create opportunities for farmers and farm workers while creating quality returns and looking at the space very pragmatically.

1:12:36So if you're trying to build in that, I think we just made ag out to sound like very hard and it is hard, but it's a niche that if you're like willing to stick with it, you can own a niche and niches can make you rich. So yeah. Yeah. So definitely love to hear from founders who are in this space. Thanks for having me.

1:12:59Great stuff there. Obviously, she highlights the labor points on the farm. It's a big reason automation is being adopted across different industries. Some great due diligence questions there, Mike, as you mentioned about what do the farm workers think of all this technology? But I really like this quote where she said, every robot and really every piece of technology I've ever seen sucks before it's good, which is a pretty sage advice for all the startups out there. But what were your takeaways from the conversation? Yeah, well, you know, it ties back to the point she kept making that the, you know, the industry moves, this industry, ag technology moves at the speed of trust.

1:13:40So that's the question to take away from this. If you're building for the field, who are the workers that you're designing it for? And have you asked them yet? And I think this is where other incubators like the Reservoir are trying to help bridge that gap for folks that may not have background in ag and helping them to get better data about what the actual deployment looks like. And, you know, another company we've covered for a long time is Burrow. And I think they're a great example of understanding, you know, the exact use case and how to work with the labor that's there, you know, to make their job better.

1:14:22And that's where they found success. So, you know, Connie can explain why her firms invest differently, because ag tech, as she said, doesn't have the usual exit that, you know, VCs might expect. So she's very prudent in her expectations about what they might look like for some of these companies. It also makes the case that, you know, the road to harvest robots, you know, may run through simpler jobs like thinning. And she's also, you know, high on crop genetics. So, so in addition to, you know, robotics, she's also, you know, thinks that crop genetics is another investment angle for, for her fun.

1:15:02So yeah. Thanks to Connie for joining us. Yeah. Great stuff there. but that's going to do it for the show you know before we sign off again a reminder about robotics summit coming up in boston june 2nd and 3rd 2027 mike i know that seems far away but we'll be here before we know it so we are recruiting on all fronts sponsors speakers partners i don't think registration is open just yet will be soon but again if you are involved in the commercial robotics business and have some technical learnings and technical expertise that you think will help other robotics developers get their robots out into the field doing useful work more.

1:15:43We want to hear from you. You can head over to roboticssummit.com to apply to speak or learn more about sponsorship opportunities. You can reach out to any one of us here at the Robot Report to learn more as well. This is the eighth year that we have run this show. It keeps getting bigger and better every single year. We'll have over 5 ,000 people there this year, over 250 exhibitors. So again, if you want to get involved, this is going to go quick. So get your session proposal in as soon as possible. And again, reach out to any one of us here. We can help you iterate through that, share some ideas, all of that.

1:16:17So again, moving quickly, Robotics Summit in Boston, June 2nd and 3rd, 2027. If you want to get involved, head to roboticssummit.com. Again, that's going to do it for the show. Thanks again to everybody for tuning in. Thanks to Connie for being the guest on the show this week. Thank you to Wybotic for sponsoring the podcast this month. New episodes of the Robot Report podcast drop each week. You can find us anywhere you listen to your podcast. Please give us a review. Really helps us out. Get us in front of more listeners. this episode was produced and edited by Mike Oitzman our executive producer is Amanda Buhner I'm Steve Crow thanks so much folks for tuning in happy Halloween have a great weekend and we'll talk to you again next week