More than 400 companies worldwide are developing robotic systems for food crop production, according to an analysis released Sept. 16 by The Mixing Bowl, an ag- and food-tech innovation organization, and the California AgTech Alliance, a statewide initiative backed by the state’s California Jobs First program.
The report, called the 2026 Crop Robotics Landscape, maps companies across 15 product and task segments spanning permanent crops, specialty crops, row and indoor crops. While the overall number of companies has grown since the organizations’ 2024 report, that growth comes with significant market turnover. Since 2024, 20 percent of the companies identified in the earlier landscape are no longer in existence, while a third of the companies in the current landscape are new.
Europe accounts for half of the companies, while the U.S. accounts for 18 percent of the total, the largest share of any single country. More than 40 percent of those U.S. companies are based in California.
The report comes at a time when the state is making significant investments in ag-tech through the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) and the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA).
"When we asked regions to identify, ‘what are your priority sectors,’ one of those sectors that consistently came up throughout the state was investing in ag-tech,” said Sebastian Sanchez, deputy secretary for immigrant and agriculture workforce at the California Labor & Workforce Development Agency, during a Sept. 16 webinar. “It's become one of the central factors of that large investment by the state in terms of how we see the future of California.”
The webinar, hosted by the Mixing Bowl and California AgTech Alliance, also featured a panel with Danny Bernstein, CEO of the Reservoir; Ben Palone, senior commercialization director at Western Growers Association; and Sebastián Sánchez. The panelists discussed trends, grower adoption, investment and challenges.
Panelists noted that ag-tech companies have made more progress on some tasks than others, while harvesting, viewed as the “holy grail” of what’s trying to be accomplished with ag-tech, remains one of the most challenging applications especially for high-labor crops.
For example, autonomous movement, including autonomous tractors and machines capable of towing equipment, as well as smart spraying and precision-agriculture technologies, are seeing grower adoption in regions like Salinas, Yuma, Arizona and the Central Valley. These technologies include laser weeders and chemical-free thinning mechanisms.
But harvest robotics remain operationally difficult to implement, the panelists emphasize. Specialty crops present a more challenging case because they are more labor intensive, require significant capital, and often have narrow and more fragile harvest windows. All of these factors make growers more cautious about incorporating new technologies, even as they look for ways to reduce labor costs.
“You have some areas like tree nuts, which have significant automation or mechanization, and there's not a huge amount of labor in the loop,” Bernstein said during the meeting. “And then you have other areas like table grapes or stone fruit or strawberries that are extraordinarily labor intensive. Table grapes, for example, the cost of production is over 90 percent labor. Strawberries over 60-65 percent labor. These are some of the most labor intensive crops on the planet in some of the areas that are the most expensive to farm.”
The strongest market drivers pushing the crop robotics sector forward, according to the report, are growers’ reported shortages of skilled seasonal workers and rising associated costs, as well as rising input costs stemming from geopolitical impacts and raw material shortages.
Pesticide and herbicide use also face increasing pressures, driven both by public perception and regulation.
A ‘robotic revolution’ in agriculture is still in early stages despite demand, according to the authors, where adoption continues to depend on task suitability, reliability, return on investment and grower trust.
“Bottom line result: there’s a good case for crop robotics,” said Chris Taylor of The Mixing Bowl, “but the path remains challenging, and measured slower than we'd like.”