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.
TRIC Robotics, a San Luis Obispo, California-based, think 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 supposed 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.”
While Stager said the company has been very focused on what farmers want, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, TRIC wasn’t even focused on agriculture to begin with.
Stager launched the company in 2017 after completing his PhD in robotics. The company was initially focused on 3D printed robots for SWAT teams. In 2020, Stager decided to pivot into an area he thought would have more impact and started focusing on agriculture.
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“I really just wanted to answer the question, if you were to die tomorrow, would you be happy with what you accomplished in your life?” Stager said. “I was like, okay, I really need to do something impactful that can help a lot of people to feel value for myself. I kind of stumbled into agriculture on that journey, [and realized] that’s a place where we can impact so many people, just about everybody.”
Stager reached out to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to see if there was any technology they were working on that he could help commercialize, knowing from his PhD program that a lot of great technology never leaves the lab.
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