World's first robot run' farm in Japan

A Japanese firm said Monday it would open the world’s first fully automated farm with robots handling almost every step of the process, from watering seedlings to harvesting crops.

Kyoto-based Spread said the indoor grow house will start operating by the middle of 2017 and produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day. It hopes to boost that figure to half a million lettuce heads daily within five years. The farm, measuring about 47,300 sqft, will have floor-to-ceiling shelves where the produce is grown. “Seed planting will still be done by people, but the rest of the process, including harvesting, will be done by industrial robots,” company official Koji Morisada said.

The move to robot labour would chop personnel costs by about half and knock energy expenses down by nearly one third, Morisada added. Robot-obsessed Japan has repeatedly turned to automated workers to fill labour shortages that are projected to get worse as the country rapidly ages.

— Source: www.phys.org