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

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