Robot farmers are gaining traction

Inside a warehouse in the middle of the suburban office sprawl of San Carlos, a Silicon Valley town south of San Francisco, hundreds of heads of lettuce and herbs grow next to a mobile robot designed to move the plants as they get bigger. In a lab next door, engineers tweak robots that can handle every part of the growing process, from planting seeds to packaging harvested heads of lettuce for a grocery store. By early 2018, Iron Ox, the startup behind the R&D farm, plans to open an 8,000-square-foot production farm nearby–all fully automated, in a system that the company says can make local, pesticide-free food production as cheap as traditional agriculture in the field.