How Delaware’s TRIC Robotics is impacting California agriculture

Editor’s note: This story first appeared as a newsletter alongside a roundup of Technical.ly’s best reporting from the week, job openings and more. Subscribe here to get updates on Delaware tech, business and innovation news in your inbox on Thursdays.

---

TRIC Robotics developed its agtech — robots that bathe strawberry crops in UV-C light as an alternative to pesticides — at the University of Delaware. The company then tested the bots in the fields of Fifer Orchards in Kent County, as well as sites in Georgetown and Kernersville. In 2020, TRIC won the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce’s Swim with the Sharks competition.

Recently, the homegrown biz received its biggest funding milestone, and biggest national kudos, yet: $965,000 from the National Science Foundation, which combined with a $625,000 grant from the USDA positions the startup for a promising 2023.

To really get TRIC off the ground, founder Adam Stager decided to make a major move to where 90% of the industry’s strawberries are grown: Central California.

“We ended up taking two of the platforms that we had designed for the East Coast and we just threw them on top of the SUV and came out to California,” Stager said. “That really helped us get through to the R&D phase and we were getting really great results, it was a very visible difference in crop health.”

The biggest challenge has been keeping up with the demand for the tech, which has evolved to be bigger and capable of treating larger crops.

“I just had these little robots that were constantly breaking that I had built in my garage in Delaware and they just weren’t up to the task of going to the large California Farm,” Stager said. “So we just took the plunge and basically bootstrapped a very large version of this, a tractor-sized version of it. This year, we put that on a five-acre farm with the customer paying and started to get good results.”

The company’s tech at work:

While California is very much where the strawberry farms are, Stager sees potential for bringing the evolved tech back to Delaware.

“A really exciting idea for me is bringing the strawberries back to Delaware,” he said. “Right now there’s so much pest pressure, especially with mold and the wetness that we have on the East Coast. That makes it really difficult to grow strawberries, but Delaware’s in such a great population center where we can distribute to all these big cities that it would be a really high profitability crop for farmers in Delaware.”

In the meantime, Stager and his growing team are focused on bringing the technology to market as a service business model.

You could say growth is top of mind.

“I think we’re really on the cusp of getting this to market acceptance, which is when a farmer would consider it to be an equal or better equivalent to what they’ve been doing for so many years now,” Stager said. “We’ll be doing 95 acres next year. We’re bringing the farmers on board and they’re seeing the value.”

Check out this short clip to see TRIC robots in action: