Meet the Entrepreneurs Training 70,000-Pound Robots to Pick Your Broccoli

How do robots become a vital part of the $222 billion farming business? Practice, practice, practice.

From left: Farmers, entrepreneurs, and community members tour Reservoir Farms’s flagship agtech incubator, which opened in Salinas, Calif. in March 2026; High Degree’s machine that uses steam to fight fungus and weeds without chemicals; a century-old barn Reservoir Farms converted into an engineering and robotics workshop. Photos: Courtesy Company

When Pascal Labrecque, 39, set out to build a robot that could pluck crops like broccoli and romaine straight from the fields, he and his co-founder Éric Lapalme, 49, ran into a problem that no amount of artificial intelligence or venture capital could fix: Quebec, Canada, where they were based, has a vegetable-harvesting season of just three to four months. That doesn’t leave much time to test the machine’s gripper and blades, valuable information the duo needed while designing and building a harvesting machine.  

As Labrecque was fundraising for SAMI Robotics, he met Danny Bernstein, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with an idea that would buy his startup more precious time in the field: In March Bernstein opened Reservoir Farms, an incubator where start-ups can test and build new technology for agriculture alongside other budding companies. SAMI joined Reservoir’s outpost in California’s Salinas Valley, where the SAMI’s 70,000-pound robot gathers data and practices picking vegetables seven months a........

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