US-based AgTech company AppHarvest has announced the acquisition of Root AI, an artificial intelligence farming start-up.

Established in 2018, Root AI is based in Somerville, Massachusetts, and engaged in developing robots to help manage high-tech indoor farms.

AppHarvest founder and CEO Jonathan Webb said: “Farming as we’ve known it is broken because of the increasing number of variables such as extreme weather, droughts, fire and contamination by animals that make our food system unreliable.

“Indoor farming solves for many of those challenges, and the data gathered can exponentially deliver more insights that help us predict and control crop quality and yield.

“One of the key challenges in agriculture is accurately predicting yield. Many downstream decisions from work scheduling to transportation to retail planning are based on that. Any deviation between projection and actual yield can result in fire drills for numerous functions to adjust for the change, and AI can help solve for that.”

For this acquisition, AppHarvest is investing nearly $60m, which includes $10m in cash and the balance by issuing approximately 2,328,000 AppHarvest common shares.

The deal includes Root AI and its robotic universal harvester Virgo, which is claimed to be the world’s first universal harvester that can be configured to identify and harvest multiple crops of varying sizes, including tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, as well as more delicate fruits such as strawberries.

As part of the deal, Root AI’s 19 full-time employees will join AppHarvest’s technology group.

Through this acquisition, AppHarvest intends to take the advantage of the data collected by the robots as they harvest to evaluate crop health, precisely predict yield and optimise overall operations of the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) facility.

Root AI co-founder and CEO Josh Lessing said: “A piece of food – whether that’s a tomato or a berry or a cucumber – is an outcome from many variables that are part of the growing process.

“Enhanced data collection for each plant through the robot can lead to insights that teach us precisely how to design better, more resilient food systems that are reliable and that produce more food with fewer resources.

“Joining forces with AppHarvest is a natural fit: we want to ensure a stable, safe supply of the nutritious and healthy food that people should be eating – grown sustainably – and doing that at the scale of AppHarvest gives us the opportunity to make the greatest difference.”

Lessing will join AppHarvest as a chief technology officer, wher he will focus on developing robots and their AI capabilities for the network of indoor farms that AppHarvest is building.