TopFarmRobots · Farm robots, weekly · Week of October 26, 2026
Hi there,
Welcome to issue five. Quick intro if you're new: I'm Carl Lippert, a farm owner and technologist. topfarmrobots.com is my side project, and this weekly email is where I share the farm robots I find.
Last week was FIRA USA in Yakima, and it brought launches, like a self-driving orchard tractor from Kubota and Agtonomy. It also brought two reminders that this is a hard business: Carbon Robotics cut staff, and Dutch robot maker AIGRO was declared bankrupt.
The spotlight is Earth Rover, a UK startup whose solar-powered robot kills weeds with a short pulse of concentrated light. And the job of the week is at a small team in Germany building a robot to harvest green asparagus.
One tap: which free extra would you actually use?
Last week I asked this by reply. This week it's one tap. Each answer opens the closest page already on the site, and I count the taps.
→ A monthly roundup of farm-robot funding rounds
→ A list of farm-robot companies that are hiring
→ A side-by-side sheet of robot prices and specs
→ None, the weekly email is enough
Or hit reply and name the robot maker you'd like me to spotlight next. I read every reply.
New on TopFarmRobots
Finite Robotics Robothinner (Tic, Tac and Toe)
A self-driving orchard robot from Finite Robotics in Kitchener, Ontario, that thins apple and pear fruitlets down to the count a grower sets, including rules like thinning to doubles or to kings. It runs on solar with a gasoline backup, weighs about 1,000 kg, and works at up to 4 km/h. Finite told FIRA it built three robots for 2026 and ran them across 14 orchards, and it sells thinning as a service, priced per acre or per 1,000 fruitlets removed. The founders say they are fruit growers themselves, with their own orchard.
Renewables e2T
An all-electric two-wheel tractor from Renewables Inc. in Santa Rosa, California, made for small and mid-size farms that grow on 30-inch beds. It has a 5 kWh battery, 20 inches of clearance over the bed, a top speed of 6 mph, and it weighs 250 lb. You can walk behind it or run it by wireless remote, and the company says it's working toward full autonomy. The listed base price is $7,500, with options like a PTO ($2,900), a bigger 15 kWh battery ($2,400) and a solar shade canopy ($1,200).
Kingman Ag Minion Mini
Not a new tractor, but a bolt-on kit that makes the tractors growers already own drive themselves. Kingman Ag, from Lemoore, California, fits cameras, RTK GPS, a safety bumper and its own antenna, and one switch turns it back into a normal tractor. It works on John Deere, New Holland, Kubota, Deutz-Fahr and Fendt tractors for jobs like spraying, mowing, discing and mechanical weeding, and Kingman's team watches every machine remotely, day and night. The company says its kits have run more than 30,000 hours in vineyards and orchards over five-plus commercial seasons.
Company spotlight: Earth Rover
Earth Rover is a UK company, founded in 2017 and based at the Agri-EPI Centre in Edgmond, Shropshire. Its robot, CLAWS (Concentrated Light Autonomous Weeding and Scouting), drives itself along vegetable and salad beds, spots weeds with cameras, and kills each one with a short pulse of concentrated light aimed at its growing point. The same cameras log the crop plants for counts and crop health.
CEO James Miller told AgFunderNews that the light is focused like a magnifying glass rather than a laser beam, so it becomes eye-safe past a set distance. It uses so little power that the robot runs on batteries and solar panels for up to 16 hours.
The numbers he gave: about £150,000 per robot, with a discount for early buyers; 10 pilot units sold and 15 more being built; payback in one to three years, depending on a farm's weeding costs. Customers buy the robots outright because, he said, "all farmers want to weed when they want to weed." Earth Rover plans to raise a Series A next year.
Recent founder talk: Miller explains how CLAWS works and what it costs in an AgFunderNews video interview (Oct 22, 2026), recorded at the World Agri-Tech summit in London.
Job of the week
Robotics Engineer – Integration & Control at Prefiro
Prefiro GmbH · Karlsruhe, Germany · on-site · posted Oct 23, 2026
Prefiro, a 2024 spin-out from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, is building what it calls the first autonomous harvester for green asparagus, a crop still picked entirely by hand. The team is 8 full-time people plus interns, and this role gets your code running on their machines on German farms in your first season. The posting asks for 2+ years of hands-on work with real robots, C++ and Python, and ROS 2, and lists €55,000–€65,000 a year plus stock options.
See the job and apply · Prefiro on TopFarmRobots · More farm-robot jobs
Hiring at a company that builds farm robots? Hit reply and tell me about the role.
In the news
Kubota and Agtonomy launch a self-driving orchard tractor (Oct 21). At FIRA USA in Yakima, Kubota North America and Agtonomy showed a driverless version of Kubota's M5L, a low-profile tractor for orchards and nut crops. It's the third tractor Agtonomy has made autonomous, after the Bobcat CT4045 and the Kubota M5N, using the same autonomy system. Kubota says it's meant for jobs like spraying, sanitation mowing and cultivating under the trees, with Kubota dealers handling support. North American growers can pre-order it now for delivery in 2027.
Why it matters: Growers can get a self-driving tractor through a brand and dealer they already know, not only from a startup. Future Farming · On TopFarmRobots
Carbon Robotics cuts staff (Oct 19). The Seattle maker of the LaserWeeder confirmed layoffs to GeekWire across several departments, in the US and abroad, to "realign costs due to broader economic conditions." It didn't say how many people were cut, and it now has 275 employees. Carbon has raised about $177 million, and its CEO said recently that it had passed $100 million in revenue.
Why it matters: Even one of the biggest farm-robot startups is cutting costs right now. GeekWire · On TopFarmRobots
Dutch robot maker AIGRO declared bankrupt (Oct 19). A Dutch court declared AIGRO, from Best in the Netherlands, bankrupt on Oct 19, Future Farming reported. AIGRO was founded in 2019 and made the AIGRO UP, a light self-driving tool carrier for jobs like weeding and mowing. CEO Wim Reijersen van Buuren declined to give a cause, said owners and users had been told, and said management is looking for a party to restart the company.
Why it matters: If you own a robot from a small maker, or are thinking about one, it's worth asking who supports it if the company doesn't make it. Future Farming · On TopFarmRobots
Worth watching
The Core Matter Show: Bonsai Robotics CEO Tyler Niday on the economics of farm autonomy
Recorded at Reservoir Farms in Salinas and published Oct 16, 2026 (about 26 minutes). Niday goes from Blue River's early lettuce-thinning machine, which carried 18 desktop computers, to why Bonsai now builds its own machines. He says "the demo is just 1% of the business," and that Bonsai's hybrid machine burns about 3 gallons of diesel a day where a tractor would burn 35. He also tells how cattle egrets circling a mower kept stopping the machine, and how Bonsai trained on simulated birds to fix it.
Watch on YouTube · Episode notes and transcript · Bonsai Robotics on TopFarmRobots
Coming up
EuroTier 2026 · Nov 10–13, Hanover, Germany
The big livestock-farming trade show, run by DLG. This year's programme has a "Barn Robot Event" spotlight on automated machines for dairy farms, plus expert stages on sensors, digital tools and AI.
EuroTier website · All upcoming events
Don't forget: tap one of the four answers near the top. One tap tells me which extra to build first. — Carl
Building a farm robot? Submit it to the catalog with the "Submit a robot" button at topfarmrobots.com.