It starts with a seed: A Food Robotics Explainer for Kids

It starts with a seed. An apple seed, a tomato seed, some type of seed gets planted in the ground. Then that seed grows. And it grows. Slowly, the plant pierces through the dirt and into the light. Weeks to months later, it bears fruit. What was once an apple seed is now a tree standing tall with countless of apples on it. That tomato seed has become a plant, waist-high, bearing dozens of ripe tomatoes. The fruit gets picked and, when the harvest is plenty, ships out to warehouses where a restaurant or grocery buys it. A cook takes the fruit, cuts it up, then puts it in a salad for you and a salad for me.

But the process is changing. Dan Steere is CEO at Abundant Robotics, a company that makes robots. He says, “Everything about farming, everything you can look at about farming, there’s major technologies coming in the next 10 years to make each part of farming more efficient, more productive, and hopefully healthier and less expensive.” By time you’re an adult, the entire food cycle will likely be robotic.

That’s almost the case now. If we go back to our seed, we’ll see robots are already involved in the very beginning: They show farmers where to plant.

Land on a farm is not level: It can have rises or holes or ditches in it. Plowing can even the ground out some, but never completely. If there’s…