Van de Vegte gives a lot of credit to a local mushroom grower for letting VRIC’s team access his facility and helping them understand how mushrooms are grown and harvested.

Not only does any machine replacing a human process have to be at least as quick and as accurate, it also has to be affordable for farmers.

“Our functionality has to be tied to cost. We don’t want a great system that nobody can afford,” he says.

The next step for VRIC’s mushroom harvest system is a small-scale production pilot in a commercial mushroom farm to help Van de Vegte understand the quality and productivity of the system and how it could best be implemented.

It’s important they proceed slowly and carefully, he says, so they’re not rushing to market with a technology that isn’t ready.

Long term, VRIC’s objective is to license the intellectual property and then market it worldwide, with the resulting royalties being used to fund future research.

The centre’s automation team is working on other systems as well, two in particular for the ornamental flower industry. One machine can put colourful plastic or paper sheets, labels and sleeves on about 500 potted plants per hour to ready them for market, and another can transplant plant cuttings and bulbs from trays into individual pots.

Workers currently perform both jobs manually.

All three systems are made-in-Ontario solutions, with Vineland partnering with local firms to assist with various stages of development or production.

The current project focuses on technology for mushroom and ornamental greenhouse growers, but Van de Vegte says in the future, they’d like to expand into orchards and vegetable greenhouses as well.

The automated systems program at VRIC is supported through FedDev Ontario, with Vineland’s in-kind contributions supported by an investment in Vineland through Growing Forward 2, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative.

This article is one in a series provided by AgInnovation Ontario highlighting innovation in Ontario’s agri-food sector. AgInnovation Ontario is a project of the Agri-Technology Commercialization Centre (ATCC). The ATCC is funded by Growing Forward 2, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative. www.aginnovationontario.ca.