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4AG Robotics CEO Sean O'Connor adjusts a suction cup on the company's mushroom-picking robot in Salmon Arm, B.C. on Dec. 21, 2024.Marissa Tiel/The Globe and Mail

A robot scales aluminum shelves filled with mushrooms growing in a mix of soil and peat moss at a warehouse in the small B.C. town of Salmon Arm.

The robot, a metal arm attached to a box that slides up and down, scans the mushrooms. If they are the right size, colour and quality, it reaches out and delicately grips their tops with a suction cup. The robot – developed by 4AG Robotics – will lift the mushrooms and place them in a cardboard box, where they can be packed and shipped to grocery stores across British Columbia.

Just outside London, Ont., another automated machine, designed by Mycionics Inc., is being developed to harvest mushrooms. This time the mushrooms come to the robot in a large crate for scanning. If they meet the criteria, a claw picks them up and puts them aside for packaging. Humans work alongside the robot, doubling the speed of harvest.

These two technologies, from different parts of Canada, have been deployed to farms around the world in the effort to automate mushroom harvesting.

The mushroom business worldwide was worth around US$50.3-billion in 2021, and was expected to grow at a rate of 9.7 per cent from 2022 to 2030, driven by technological advancements in production and a rise in consumer demand for meat alternatives. Canada is the eighth-largest producer of mushrooms worldwide – Ontario and B.C. growers produce enough mushrooms in a year to top 1.2 billion pizzas.

But the industry at home and abroad is stifled by labour challenges: Labour accounts for up to half of operating costs, and there is a shortage of mushroom pickers.


A suction cup attaches to a mushroom as 4AG Robotics demonstrates its mushroom-picking robot, nicknamed 'Shuswap'. The robot is able to prune and pick mushrooms, a job that was previously only possible with nimble human hands.Marissa Tiel/The Globe and Mail

B.C.’s 4AG and Ontario’s Mycionics Inc. are key players working to solve these labour challenges. Their strategies for automating mushroom picking differ, but the process they develop could one day be used to harvest other fresh produce.

Agaricus bisporus mushrooms, the common button type found in grocery stores, make up 87.9 per cent of mushroom production in Canada. They’re grown using a technique called the “Dutch rack” or “Dutch shelf system,” where the fungi are cultivated on stacked aluminum shelves in warehouses with up to 40 rooms.

The technique entered the marketplace in the 1980s and led to expanded production and increased efficiency. Mushrooms don’t photosynthesize, which means they can be grown indoors away from unpredictable weather, and they can be stacked so land costs are minimized.

However, growing mushrooms in warehouses does not address labour costs, which are the largest expense for a mushroom grower at 35 to 51 per cent of total farm expenses, according to the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council. And that’s if farms can find workers. Harvesting mushrooms is draining work as the fungi double in size every 24 hours and need constant pruning in dark, humid warehouses. Turnover is high.

Mushroom farms nationally have a job vacancy rate of more than 12 per cent, according to Mushrooms Canada, an organization that represents mushroom growers, processors and other industry players.

“It’s one of the few forms of agriculture that didn’t mechanize 100 years ago when we replaced the donkey or the horse,” said Sean O’Connor, CEO of 4AG Robotics.

Designing a harvesting robot meant translating what is intuitive for humans – a delicate but firm grip, judging the age and health of a living and growing thing – into a hard science for robots. The evolution of artificial intelligence over the past five years has made software more advanced and capable of responding to the growing environment.

Mr. O’Connor said that in April, 4AG became the first company in the world to harvest a mushroom crop without any human assistance. The company’s suction-cup design was inspired by an octopus’s tentacles.
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4AG Robotics CEO Sean O'Connor stands in the company's industrial headquarters in Salmon Arm, B.C. on Dec. 21, 2024.Marissa Tiel/The Globe and Mail

Since then, 4AG has sold 33 robots for a total of $8.5-million to six farms around the world, including in Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and the United States. The farms are testing the technology and within the next year will decide whether to double down and outfit entire warehouses at a cost of $20-million to $30-million each, Mr. O’Connor said.

The biggest selling feature is that 4AG’s robot can be outfitted to operate in an existing mushroom farm by being added to the standardized shelving.

Founded in 2014, Ontario-based Mycionics started with a strategy similar to 4AG: The robot went to the mushroom, and the idea was to create a system that required no human involvement.

It didn’t work. The warehouse had been designed for human harvesters, and the complexity of scanning the mushrooms, picking them without damage, cutting, packing, stacking and weighing them added complexity – and room for error.

“We ended up in a situation where the customer is essentially told to buy an expensive machine that doesn’t perform at the same level as a human can,” said Stefan Glibetic, chief engineer and chief technology officer at Mycionics.

Mr. Glibetic realized a new strategy was required, and that meant rethinking the infrastructure. Based on a model promoted by Dutch company Christiaens Group, Mycionics moved toward a “drawer system” that mimics a car manufacturing assembly line, where the mushrooms are moved to the robot.

Mycionics also gave up on the idea of fully automating harvesting. Humans still perform more specialized tasks such as thinning and disease management, accounting for 20 per cent of the work, and robots do more repetitive tasks, such as picking the mushrooms and putting them aside for packaging, which increases productivity, Mr. Glibetic said.


4AG Robotics Director of Mechanical Engineering James Gibson, left, and Mr. O'Connor, demonstrate their mushroom-picking robot's tool tray.Marissa Tiel/The Globe and Mail

“If you strive to pick 100 per cent of the mushrooms with your robot, you’re going to add those complexities to the system. That’s going to significantly decrease performance, but also increase costs and reduce reliability.”

Mycionics robots are currently operating in farms in Canada and the Netherlands. Organic mushroom grower Highline Mushrooms will be using the drawer system in their new warehouse in Leamington, Ont., Mr. Glibetic said.

This system, however, requires farmers to abandon existing infrastructure and rebuild their warehouses.

Both Mr. O’Connor and Mr. Glibetic agree that for the sector to enter the next stage, it must adapt to change.

Automating harvesting has the same potential as the Dutch rack technique that increased yields and decreased costs when it launched 40 years ago. Back then, companies that did not adapt to the new technology fell behind. Consolidation driven by high upfront capital costs has been typical in the Canadian market. Large farms – those with more than $2-million in revenue – represent 90 per cent of the reported mushroom growers in B.C., according to Statistics Canada.

Much like the mushroom industry pioneered controlled-environment farming, automated harvesting might chart the course for the rest of the fresh produce sector, said Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph.

The future of growing most fruits and vegetables is high-tech, controlled-environment agriculture, Mr. Fraser said. Greenhouses increase efficiency, cut costs and boost yields.

Yet the harvesting of fruit and vegetables is largely done by hand, and this is a “bottleneck” in the industry, he said. Human labour is expensive, and Canadian producers largely rely on a steady supply of migrant workers from the Caribbean and Central America, a supply that will be more unreliable as federal immigration policy shifts.

While it is not easy to design a robot that can harvest mushrooms, other products will be even more difficult, Mr. Fraser said. For example, in the case of picking strawberries, the technology needs to tell the difference between different shades of red, twist the fruit at just the right angle to pick it from the vine without damage, and move the fruit through a dense bush without damaging other fruits.

This is not a problem that the mushroom robot can solve immediately, but, to Mr. O’Connor, 4AG’s work is part of a bigger movement that he hopes will make changes that stretch beyond harvest and food production.

“Any time you have people doing tasks that a human shouldn’t be doing … that uses the human body as a trading piece for money, that’s where we’re seeing robots needed at the highest rate, and that’s where we’re going to see robots take off.”

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