Muddy Machines

Muddy Machines’ primary offering is an autonomous, fully-electric agricultural robot named Sprout that can precisely harvest asparagus for up to 16 hours a day. A lightweight, all-terrain farming vehicle, Sprout autonomously drives into fields and detects, measures, cuts, and baskets asparagus spears according to the grower’s specifications. Sprout can also navigate tight clusters of vegetables, and harvest spears that are crooked or grow sideways.

The company’s robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model ensures that farmers don’t have to spend capex dollars on robots that will sit unused for much of the year—the harvesting season lasts only 12 weeks. Customers monitor “herds” of Sprout robots through Muddy Machines’ custom app, which displays live harvest performance to farm owners and machine operators, allowing them to make decisions based on real-time information. Sprout’s advanced AI also uses reinforcement learning to predict crop yields and report them to growers.

Christopher Chavasse, Founder and CEO, says, “we’re working toward a broader harvesting-as-a-service model through robots that perform selective harvesting and precision farm operations. Our current RaaS model allows customers to order and deploy robots on the same day, promptly addressing labor shortages. Farmers can also quickly scale up and down: When Sprout operates as part of a larger herd, it communicates with other machines to optimize harvest performance.”