By JAMIE SEARS RAWLINGS

Kentucky Correspondent

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — Raising a garden is hard work. Planting seeds by hand is only followed by daily watering and then plucking, pruning and weeding, and that’s only if the plants grow as they should. What if the plants are plagued by pests, sending you to the Internet countless times for diagnosis and recommended solutions?

No more, says FarmBot Founder and CEO Rory Aronson.

His FarmBot Genesis product works like a 3D printer, with robotic arms moving over a garden bed, precisely planting seeds, watering plants and monitoring soil, all according to specifications set in a web application managed by the owner or operator.

The device, according to Aronson, is so hands-off that users can set their system to send a text or email notification when the plants are ready for harvest. Along with those notifications come handy harvesting tips and video demonstrations.

“As we all know, growing food can be a lot of work,” said Aronson.

“Bringing a piece of technology into the system that can help alleviate some of the issues like the requirement of knowledge, the requirement of being really diligent and being at the garden side every day, we can eliminate some of those requirements which then brings the opportunity for even the busy city-dweller to have the ability to grow their own food in their own backyard.”

The mechanical engineer and self-processed social entrepreneur formed the idea for FarmBot in 2013 and, for the next three years, worked with a small team to bring it to the market. In 2016, the original FarmBot Genesis was introduced. In the year since, the team has sold and shipped 500 units.

Aronson estimates that 40 percent of FarmBot users purchased the machine for its original purpose – easier gardening in small backyard plots. Nearly the same number of buyers, Aronson says, are educators and institutions who are studying the machine in robotics, engineering and agriculture classes ranging from elementary schools all the way to universities. The remaining 20 percent are commercial agriculturists.

“Commercial farmers or people in the ag industry are looking at FarmBot as a new technology that, maybe not right now, but one day could help them improve the efficiency of their operation or give them new abilities that they didn’t have before, and so they are piloting this technology and seeing how it’s going to work for them,” Aronson said.

Aronson and his California-based team of five members currently work with commercial producers to adapt FarmBot devices to meet their needs, finding opportunities literally landing on their doorsteps courtesy of producers seeking more efficient operations for their farms.

“There’s a company in Florida that grows orange trees, and they have a process where there’s a person planting the seeds and transplanting them from small trays to larger pots,” Aronson said. “They are actually piloting FarmBot to do those processes for them, which would be more efficient and more controlled.

“There’s potentially lots of applications for FarmBot that aren’t necessarily growing the complete plant from seed to harvest.”

“We work with customers to figure out how we can adapt FarmBot to this myriad of different needs that people have.”

As an answer to the interested commercial agriculture market, Aronson’s team is scaling up the current FarmBot Genesis model, rolling out a newer, bigger model in December. Planned to cover approximately four times the area that the FarmBot Geneis covers, Aronson admits that it is still not quite large enough for most commercial operations.

“In our research and development pipeline are much larger devices that are covering an area that’s the size of a small to medium commercial greenhouse,” he said. “We will continue to push this technology to scale as large as it can possibly be so that commercial farmers can make use of it.”

Interested purchasers can order a FarmBot kit online for $2,595, or plans for the device are available for free on FarmBot’s website, a concept that was fundamental to Aronson from the beginning.

“I think it really goes back to the basic human needs that everyone needs, you need water, you need shelter, you need community, you need food, and so if I have an idea for how to create food in a way that is sustainable and empowers people to take ownership over the food production process and they can feed themselves and their families healthy produce, I think it’s the morally right thing to do to share that idea,” he said of his open source concept.

Taking the open source concept one step further, Aronson and his team have created a FarmBot online community, where users can interface with each other, sharing success and networking when problems arise.

“We have the opportunity to link up farmers from all over the world with the same data and one farmer’s innovation in one plot of land, maybe in California on a big farm in the Central Valley could figure out how to grow something 10 percent more efficient and then if they contribute that data or that methodology back to the open source community, somebody over in Europe could use that data or that methodology and also see that benefit,” said Aronson.

“So, going back to the moral philosophy behind FarmBot, sharing these ideas is good for everyone.”

“Yes, there’s competition within the farming world, but at the end of the day, we’re all in this together to try to feed everyone.”