Asparagus Harvesting Robot: From Knife to ABB Lines

An asparagus harvesting robot has to deal with a crop that will not wait. Green spears push out of the soil by up to 2 inches a day, white ones grow hidden inside ridges of earth, and the usual way to get them out is still a person with a knife who walks the field every day. This post follows that work from hand cutting and a century of harvest machines that never caught on, to the AVL Motion S9000 now picking in Dutch fields and a new prototype from Munich. It ends with where ABB robots could help once the spears are cut, in the packhouse and on the pallet.

Pickers harvest white asparagus between foil-covered ridges near Hockenheim, Germany, May 2012. Photo: AnRo0002 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Knives, foil and machines that never caught on

People have eaten asparagus for a long time, and Apicius gave a recipe for it in the first century AD. Picking is still mostly hand work. Green spears are cut with an asparagus knife or snapped off near the soil line once they are at least 7 inches tall and 5/16 inch thick. Because a spear can grow up to 2 inches a day, Penn State Extension advises picking every day in season, and a mature bed is harvested for about six to seven weeks. White asparagus is grown under ridges of soil that keep out the light, so its shoots never turn green.

Two farm boys with asparagus knives and a crate of freshly cut white asparagus, 1911. Photo: unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

White asparagus is harder still. Pickers watch for tips breaking through the crest of the ridge and check the field twice a day, in the early morning and the evening. They dig down as far as 25 centimetres, cut the spear at its base with a special knife, then refill and smooth the hole so the next tip is easy to spot. Growers cover the ridges with foil, black side out to warm the soil or white side out to slow it. One harvest aid, the Spargelspinne or asparagus spider, runs under the foil so workers do not have to lift and replace it by hand.

A Spargelspinne harvest machine with crates riding on a foil-covered asparagus ridge, 2018. Photo: Kadereit / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Engineers have tried to mechanize the job for more than a century. Trials began in the United States in 1907, and research and patents followed in the US and Australia, mostly between the 1950s and the 1990s, yet none of those methods caught on. Non-selective machines, which cut every shoot at once, can damage the roots and lower later yields, so growers prefer selective machines that take only the spears that are ready. Choosing one spear and leaving its neighbours takes eyes and judgement, which is why the harvesters now in fields carry cameras.

Women harvest hands picking asparagus in Rochelle, Illinois, around August 1942. Photo: Ann Rosener / NARA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Selective robots in the field and the labour bill

One machine is already on sale: the AVL Compact S9000 from AVL Motion in the Netherlands, which reached the market after eight years of development. It is about 6 metres long and 2.4 metres wide, needs one operator and uses AI cameras to find spears that are ready to cut. Twelve arms on a carousel each carry a harvesting module with scissor-like blades and an inflatable rubber collar that grips the spear, and a full cycle takes under a second. In 2025 the robot cost €400,000 excluding VAT, and AVL Motion put its harvesting cost at €0.92 a kilo against €1.31 by hand.

Pickers work along white foil-covered asparagus ridges near Hockenheim, Germany, May 2012. Photo: AnRo0002 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Wageningen University & Research tested those claims against hand picking at the Dutch grower Teboza on 330 metre rows and found no significant difference in quality across the AAA, AA, A and B+C classes. Hand pickers managed about 300 spears an hour. The robot averaged about 3,000 harvesting actions an hour, with peaks of 6,000, and covered 100 metres in three minutes against ten by hand. "When there are many asparagus to pick, the robot replaces six to seven workers," said Teboza's Rik Kursten. AVL Motion expects at least 150 units across Europe by 2028.

A worker harvests white asparagus by hand on a farm in the Mělník area of the Czech Republic, 2017. Photo: Český chřest, s.r.o. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

New Zealand's season shows why growers are watching. On 22 October RNZ reported that the season was off to what Waikato grower Andrew Keaney of Boyd's Asparagus called "a boomer start", but he said asparagus harvests are particularly labour intensive and labour is his biggest single cost. ABB does not make field harvesters, and no ABB project in asparagus has been reported. Its robots could fit after the cut, where spears are already washed and sorted into grades by machine. An IRB 360 FlexPicker, which ABB calls the fastest industrial delta robot in the world, handles up to 8 kg and comes in a stainless version validated to IP69K for wash-down food lines.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking items on a moving line. Photo: ABB

What asparagus robots still have to learn

Research is now turning to green asparagus, which grows in the open and is cut at ground level. At the Technical University of Munich, Andreas Neubauer built a prototype that finds ripe green spears in several camera images while it moves. It reaches up to 0.8 metres a second on uneven ground and 1 metre a second on even ground, above the 0.33 metres a second the team calculated as the minimum for commercial use. "Asparagus is one of the most labor-intensive crops on the market," the university said in March 2026. The team's next steps are better detection, then the harvesting algorithm and the cutting tool.

A bunch of green asparagus spears from the harvest, 2013. Photo: terri_bateman / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

After the field, the work moves to the packhouse, and our post on fruit packhouse automation covers the robots already used there. ABB robots already handle fresh vegetables in the Netherlands. At Heemskerk's plant in Rijnsburg, an IRB 660 feeds crates of fruit, vegetables and ready meals onto a conveyor, six IRB 6700 robots on a track sort them into supermarket orders, and two more IRB 6700s stack them. A spear packing cell could add an IRB 1200 Hygienic, which ABB designs for fruit and vegetables, but that remains a possibility, and such cells are usually planned first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 6700 sorts crates of packed salads and vegetables into supermarket order racks at Heemskerk in Rijnsburg, Netherlands. Photo: ABB

Cost is the first hurdle, since €400,000 is a large bet on a crop that a mature bed yields for only six to seven weeks a year. Robots also need long rows, at least 300 metres according to the Wageningen test, and the skills change: one operator runs the S9000 and packs crates from its conveyor. For shoppers the season looks cheap, with RNZ reporting bunches at $4 to $6 in October, while Keaney said he cannot pass his rising costs on to customers. The pressure to automate comes from labour. Heemskerk named a shortage of skilled labour as one reason for its ABB robots, and Washington state hires about 35,000 seasonal H-2A farm workers a year, the Tri-City Herald reported on 19 October.

An ABB robot on a floor track handles crates at Heemskerk's fresh food plant in Rijnsburg. Photo: ABB

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