Avocado
Fruit sits high in dense evergreen canopy and is picked by hand from ladders. Reach and in-canopy maneuvering are the whole problem — which is exactly what the arm is built for.
Specialty crop robotics · Fremont, CA
Most orchard robots stop at ten feet.Ours keeps going.
Avocados and stone fruit grow on full-size trees — tall, dense, and nothing like the trellised rows that current harvesting automation was designed for. Farm Giraffe builds a telescoping arm that reaches deep into natural canopy, so growers can automate the crops everyone else skipped.
Conventional
platforms
platforms
Farm Giraffe
working range
working range
0 ft
5
10 ft
15
20
25 ft +
Vertical working range.
Canopy height is the constraint
nobody else solved.
The gap
Tree fruit still comes down by hand
Harvesting automation has made real progress in apples and table grapes — crops grown on engineered trellises at picker height. Avocados and stone fruit are grown differently, and the economics of hand-picking them keep getting harder.
Labor is scarce and getting scarcer
Hand-harvest crews are harder to secure every season, and wage pressure lands hardest on the crops that need the most people per acre.
Tall canopy defeats existing machines
Platform and trellis-based systems assume fruit sits within a short, planar reach. A mature avocado or stone fruit tree offers neither.
Replanting isn't an option
Converting a mature orchard to high-density trellis means years of lost production. Automation has to work with the trees already in the ground.
The system
Built around reach
A vertical lift carries a robotic arm with a string-driven telescoping extension, so the end effector can enter the canopy from outside the drip line and work its way in without the machine having to fit between the branches. The whole platform is towed behind equipment growers already own.
Vertical working range4 – 25+ ft
Horizontal canopy penetration10 – 11 ft
Tree architectureNatural, untrellised
PlatformTowed, v1
PricingPer acre or per pound
Where we're focused
Two crops first, done properly
Rather than claim every orchard crop, we're solving avocado and stone fruit — specialty crops with high hand-labor exposure and tree structures that rule out existing automation.
Stone fruit
Peaches, nectarines, and plums bruise easily and ripen unevenly, so crews pass through the same block repeatedly. Selective picking is where careful automation earns its place.
Adjacent tree crops
The same reach problem shows up across tall-canopy orchards. Once the platform is proven, moving to a neighbouring crop becomes a matter of end-effector and detection work.
Get in touch
We want to talk to growers
If you farm avocados or stone fruit, we'd like to understand how your blocks are laid out and what harvest actually costs you. If you're an investor or research partner, get in touch directly.
- support@farmgiraffe.com
- Based in
- Fremont, California