Building Climate-Resilient Farming with Robotics: Eric Adamson of Oishii and Tortuga

Climate Rising

Content provided by Harvard Business School, Harvard Business School Business, and Environment Initiative. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Harvard Business School, Harvard Business School Business, and Environment Initiative or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

2d ago 43:41

MP3•Episode home

Eric Adamson, Robotics Executive at Oishii and co-founder of Tortuga AgTech, joins Climate Rising to share how automation and AI are transforming fruit farming. Eric explains how his team designed a strawberry-harvesting robot capable of operating in outdoor tunnels and vertical farms, bringing operational efficiency, labor savings, and climate resilience to high-value crops. He discusses why harvest is the hardest—and most impactful—problem in agriculture to automate, what it took to move from lab demo to field-scale deployment, and how they integrated custom robotics and 17 on-device AI models to achieve 97% picking accuracy. Eric also shares his climate thesis on why controlled environments reduce emissions, waste, and chemical use, and how UV-powered robots and environmental buffering help adapt to floods, fungi, and labor volatility. This episode is part of our alumni series, which also features Danielle Colson of Mantel, a carbon-capture climate-tech start-up, and Hui Wen Chan of Crusoe, which uses stranded energy to power AI data centers. Explore the full series at climaterising.org

120 episodes

#MBA #Business #Harvard Business School #Environment Initiative #Climatechange #Globalwarming #Science #Natural Sciences #HBS