The robot is supposed to pick the flowers and tomatoes: The farmers are running out of harvest workers

Asparagus season lasts until June 24th, a wonderful time for gourmets, but a stressful time for farmers and their harvest workers. Picking asparagus is backbreaking work, and not many people want to take on the task anymore.

Accordingly, finding harvest workers is difficult. "We asked ourselves two questions during the harvest season," says Dutch entrepreneur Arno van Lankveld, whose parents grew asparagus. "Will we have enough people to do the work, and how much will it cost us?"

Van Lankveld now believes he has found a technical solution to the problem. The engineer founded the company AVL Motion and has been developing a harvesting robot for asparagus since 2018.

Four machines were deployed for the first time this spring, three in the Netherlands and one in Germany. According to van Lankveld, the robot replaces 12 to 15 harvest workers and is operated by a single person via remote control. In terms of productivity, it's clearly a quantum leap. Tube-shaped knives pierce the asparagus, which then fall onto a conveyor belt into a container. The robot itself looks like a street sweeper, weighs 4.5 tons, and moves across the field at a speed of almost 4 kilometers per hour.

Robots instead of humans: This is a big issue in agriculture, especially in the Netherlands. Although the country is only the size of Switzerland, it is one of the world's leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, these companies require many employees willing to perform rigorous work for little pay.

This repeatedly triggers heated political controversy in the Netherlands. There is a widespread public belief that agricultural companies are bringing in too many poorly qualified migrants through specialized intermediaries, thus exacerbating the housing shortage.

Others, however, consider it disgraceful the cramped conditions in which some foreign harvest workers live. At the same time, a fundamental problem has gradually emerged that is likely to increasingly affect the industry: Fewer and fewer migrants from Europe are coming to the Netherlands, and cheap labor is becoming scarce. This is driving up labor costs, especially since the statutory minimum wage has recently been raised year after year in the Netherlands, but also in Germany.

Traditionally, employment agencies have recruited many harvest workers from Eastern Europe, for example, in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania. But even people there are no longer necessarily willing to take on the hard work far from their homeland. Immigration from the region is declining sharply; from Poland, for example, it has fallen by over 70 percent in the past three years. Are robots a solution to this problem, just as they have relieved people of so much hard work in factories?

In the Netherlands and elsewhere, dairy farmers in particular are already using such devices. The market leader is Lely, which achieved sales of almost €900 million in 2024. It sells robots for almost every task dairy farmers perform throughout the day: from milking to feeding to barn cleaning.

Lely has already sold 50,000 milking robots. "The cow decides when she wants to be milked," says Eveline van Wijmen of Lely. The farmer no longer has anything to do with the process. The cow trots to the fully automated milking station on its own, lured by a little concentrated feed. Slipping on rubber boots in the morning and evening and going to the barn for milking – this ritual is disappearing from the farmers' daily routine.

The robots and the data that control them will transform agriculture, says engineer Erik Pekkeriet, who heads robotics research at Wageningen University. "The tractor farmer will become a data agronomist."

According to Pekkeriet, this has many advantages. The mechanization saves working time, which farmers can use for other tasks. The researcher tells of a farmer who used to have an employee who loved driving tractors.

Instead, he has now hired a woman who primarily takes care of the cows' welfare, such as their feeding and health. This will lead to more sustainable agriculture, Pekkeriet believes. And farmers who consistently work with the data generated by sensors and IT systems spend less time on office work. Indeed, it was precisely the ever-expanding bureaucracy that recently drove many farmers in Europe to the barricades.

Compared to the dairy industry, robotization in vegetable farming is still lagging behind. Harvesting robots like the one for asparagus from AVL Motion have recently come onto the market, but they are still very expensive. Arno van Lankveld's device costs a whopping €350,000. However, it is capable of harvesting two asparagus heads per second. According to Lankveld, the investment is worthwhile for a farmer cultivating 10 hectares of land.

American farmers already use robots to harvest broccoli. However, there are still few other machines that can relieve pickers of this monotonous, yet finely motor-demanding task. "However, we are now preparing the technology for the European market," says Pekkeriet of Wageningen University.

In a building on campus, there's a machine for picking flowers. It works, says Pekkeriet. However, a manufacturer must still be found to manufacture the machine and ramp up production. Pekkeriet believes there will soon be market-ready robots for picking tomatoes, peppers, or apples. "We're conducting tests in greenhouses," he says. The researcher estimates that early adopters will be using the robots in two years.

The attitude of greenhouse operators seems to be slowly changing. Because labor was available in large numbers for a long time thanks to migration, producers focused primarily on the product and business expansion, but hardly on the production process. However, given the new labor market situation, they now have to rethink this.

Arno van Lankveld also talks about further developing his asparagus robot. In two years, it should be able to harvest green asparagus as well. And then van Lankveld wants to expand the device's range of activities to include other vegetables and fruits, such as lettuce and strawberries.

Most harvesting robots still pick vegetables and fruits, such as apples and tomatoes, at a very leisurely pace. This doesn't bother Pekkeriet. "Robots will never be as fast as humans," he says. But their productivity could still be higher. After all, they work around the clock, year-round. "We shouldn't focus on speed, but on the result," Pekkeriet says in response to skeptics' objections.