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You’ve heard of C-3PO. But are you ready for Seedo-3PO?

With New Jersey on the cusp of legalizing weed as early as next month, cannabis is expected to bring massive changes to the Garden State economy. But just how it will be grown is changing, too, thanks to an Israeli tech start-up with its eyes on New Jersey’s $1 billion weed market: Seedo.

“Cannabis is a very smart plant, but it’s very complicated to handle and grow it,” says Zohar Levy, CEO of Seedo, an Israeli and Maryland-based startup that claims to be able to quadruple the yield of traditional cannabis grows using climate-controlled chambers run by robots.

You see, despite the old cliché of “growing like a weed," cannabis has actually been something of a high-maintenance slacker when it comes to its cultivation. Sure, it thrives in warm, sunny climates, but what doesn’t? In shade, it provides far less seed and pollen. It’s not tolerant of the cold, and does not reproduce well in drought. It’s also very susceptible to fungal infections, so too much water leaves it vulnerable to pathogens.

If this conjures an image of it as the plant kingdom’s version of the Bubble Boy, you’re not far off — Seedo says it’s found a work-around to its fragility that may just revolutionize the cannabis industry.

For years, high price of fetched by traditionally farmed cannabis and low cost of human labor conspired to make robotic farming uneconomical.

"It’s extremely difficult to automate (the cultivation) of something with lots of permutations, and when you’re looking at a cannabis plant, there’s an awful lot of them,” explains Fergal Glynn, a vice president at 6 River Systems, a Waltham, Mass.-based robotics company founded by by former Amazon Robotics executives. “Plants are something where it’s very difficult to get a human completely out of the mix.”

Harmony Dispensary in Secaucus grows medical cannabis the traditional way, with humans. But robotics might soon be changing the way weed is grown. (NJ Cannabis Insider)NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Levy acknowledges this, but says Seedo found a solution that involved literally watching grass grow.

“The algorithm knows to manage the process from A to Z, because inside there’s a camera that scans the plant every few hours,” said Levy.

What else is inside the Seedo container besides the plants, gro-bots and soil? Nothing — which is kind of the whole point: Seedo uses a patented, beyond-surgical grade filtration system that ionizes the air, making it deadly to bacteria, viruses and mold.

Remember, in case you’ve forgotten, New Jersey isn’t exactly nestled against the balmy Mediterranean Sea. So at $150,000 per Seedo container, the costs to achieve this are high, but cutting the usual 10 percent to 20 percent loss to disease of a traditionally farmed cannabis crop to disease to less than 5 percent, they rapidly becomes economical.

A traditionally-farmed 1,000 square meter grow operation produces 600 kilograms of cannabis per year.

But Levy says 16 Seedo containers (along with a Seedo robot to tend them) can fit into that same space, producing 2.4 tons of dry bud. And because they can be stacked 5 high, the same robotically farmed footprint can generate up to 12 tons of dry bud cannabis.

“You can make a return on investment very fast,” said Levy, whose backers now include include Daniel Birnbaum, the CEO of SodaStream International, acquired by Pepsi late last year for $3.2 billion. “Because whether you’re in the Negev or New Jersey, you will get the same results.”

In areas where real estate comes at a premium like New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the nation, Seedo’s containers offer particular appeal. The company is already in negotiations to export containers to California and Nevada, and expects to enter the Garden State, should cannabis be legalized this year.

"We expect 2020 to be a very interesting year for us,” Levy said.

A version of this report first appeared in NJ Cannabis Insider.

Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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