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Agbotic Expands With Five New Robotic Greenhouses
SEPTEMBER 30, 2018
SYDNEY SCHAEFER / WATERTOWN DAILY TIMES
Construction is underway on Thursday on a major expansion to the robotic produce grower Agbotic in Sackets Harbor.
SACKETS HARBOR, NEW YORK — John P. Gaus plans to grow his automation-driven farm Agbotic Inc. fivefold with larger, more advanced greenhouses all in operation by early 2019.
Workers began building Mr. Gaus’s five new 18,000-square-foot greenhouses in July and have already constructed three of them at its County Route 75 farm where the company grows organic root vegetables and hemp. The foundation has also been laid for the other two, he said.
“Actually, the project is going very well. We’re on schedule,” said Mark W. Manns, president and COO of Agbotic.
The greenhouses will include the company’s signature robotic gantries, or self-navigating tilling, watering and harvesting machines, but will also feature more advanced automated technology to help gather and use more data, Mr. Gaus said.
Mr. Manns said acquiring more data with the upgraded technology will allow Agbotic to implement more optimal climate settings for produce growth, which the team can control in the greenhouses.
The expansion also includes a food washing and packing building, a cogeneration facility to power the greenhouses and plans to retrofit the first greenhouse with new technology.
“To the extent you think about an automated greenhouse as a machine, we’ll be driving that machine to machine learning and artificial intelligence,” Mr. Gaus said.
Mr. Gaus launched Agbotic in 2014 with his first 15,000-square-foot robotic greenhouse equipped with the gantry, climate controls and organic soil.
The prototype greenhouse has produced 40,000 to 60,000 pounds of food annually, but adding five larger facilities could increase the company’s annual yield to 240,000 or 320,000 pounds of food, if not more. Mr. Manns said the company could ship more product to its existing service markets in New York City, Watertown, Alexandria Bay, Syracuse, Utica, Rochester and Buffalo.
“The current greenhouse has the capability of growing year round. However, the new greenhouses will be more capable of doing it through better control measures,” Mr. Manns said.
The growth at Agbotic also comes with a growth in staff, with Mr. Gaus saying he wants to hire 10 or 11 more full-time workers.
“We’re particularly focusing on veterans leaving the military,” he said about hiring.
Despite multiplying the footprint of his operation, Mr. Gaus considers the advancement only the beginning of what he aims to accomplish with Agbotic.
The engineer and entrepreneur said he wants to replicate the success experienced by producers in the Netherlands, who also use controlled environmental agriculture. The European country generates $15 billion from agricultural product sales, Mr. Gaus said, while New York, which is about three times larger, brings in $5 billion from agriculture.
“The first greenhouse was very much a prototype to prove out the concept, and the next six greenhouses are just a small step in where we want to be,” Mr. Gaus said. “New York State is our initial focus area, but our investors are very interested in building a very big company with clusters (of greenhouses) throughout the United States.”
Agbotic also recently bolstered its operation by adding hemp to its product line. The state welcomed the company into the Industrial Hemp Agricultural Research Pilot Program, which permits farmers, businesses and institutions to research large-scale hemp production, in November. After initial testing, the firm dedicated an entire 300-foot soil bed in its greenhouse to growing hemp.