Mushroom Harvesting Robot: Growing Rooms to ABB Lines

A mushroom harvesting robot works in one of the hardest places on a farm to automate: dark, humid growing rooms with shelves stacked to the ceiling, and a crop that bruises at a touch. Button mushrooms are still picked mostly by hand. This post follows the job from French caves and Pennsylvania mushroom houses to the first vision-guided picker, looks at what Mycionics and other Canadian firms are doing on real farms in 2026, and sets out where ABB robots already handle food and could take over the packing end of the mushroom line.

A worker picks mushrooms from shelf beds into baskets. Photo: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How mushrooms were picked in caves and mushroom houses

The common button mushroom, Agaricus bisporus, was described by the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in 1707, and French growers learned to spread it by moving pieces of mycelium into beds of composted horse manure. Results were unreliable until 1893, when the Pasteur Institute in Paris produced pure culture spawn. Many French growers worked in old caves and quarries. Postcards from the early 1900s show carts of manure being hauled into these champignonnières, and every mushroom that came out was picked by hand.

Manure being brought into the Charbonnais mushroom caves at Luché, Sarthe, France, on a postcard from the 1910s. Photo: unknown author via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In the United States the trade settled around Kennett Square in Pennsylvania. A local carnation grower began raising mushrooms in 1885 in the wasted space under his raised flower beds, and the area now produces more than 500 million pounds a year, about half of the national crop. The white variety came from the same state: in 1925 Louis Ferdinand Lambert found a white mutant at the Keystone Mushroom Farm in Coatesville, and today's cream coloured mushrooms descend from it. The picking itself was still done by hand, mushroom by mushroom.

Kennett Square's water tower, marked Mushroom Capital of the World, above an old building in the snow. Photo: Ponderingpolly / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Growing became more industrial in the 1980s with the Dutch shelf system, where mushrooms grow on stacked aluminium shelves in warehouses with up to 40 rooms. Pickers now stand on trolleys that roll along the shelves, and the crop doubles in size every 24 hours, so the beds need constant pruning and picking. The first serious robot came from Silsoe Research Institute in England. In 2001 J. N. Reed and colleagues described a harvester that used a monochrome camera to locate and size mushrooms, picked an order, and lifted each one with a suction cup. On a commercial farm, more than 80 percent of its pick attempts succeeded.

Button mushrooms on long shelf beds at a mushroom farm in Hungary, 2005. Photo: Andrew Bossi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Mycionics, 4AG and the robots on mushroom farms now

The news hook this autumn is Mycionics, which marked a decade of robotic harvesting in a profile published in late September 2026. The story starts in 2013, when the Ontario grower Murray Good asked the University of Western Ontario for help with labour. Stefan Glibetic, then a robotics student, built an early prototype that scanned beds and picked mushrooms. Mycionics was formed in 2014 and moved onto Good's farm, where the team built more than thirty generations of harvesting, lifting and packing systems. When the robots failed, the engineers climbed onto the trolleys and picked the crop through the night themselves.

Young button mushrooms pushing up through the mycelium at a farm in Pradejón, Spain. Photo: Pradejoniensis / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

By 2022 the company had a full system that picked, cut, packed and stacked mushrooms inside Dutch shelving, but it was not yet fast or cheap enough. In 2023 it changed course: robots now take the repetitive harvesting, packing and handling, while people thin, prune and check quality. Its Crop Scout scanners track growth, and Mycionics says South Mill Champs in Canada bought eighteen scanning and pointing units, with an average yield gain of 6.3 percent. In British Columbia, 4AG Robotics showed the Globe and Mail a robot in Salmon Arm that climbs the shelves and lifts mushrooms with a suction cup. Labour is 35 to 51 percent of a grower's costs, the paper reported.

A modern organic mushroom farm at Bensdorf, Germany, with crates stacked outside. Photo: gregor rom / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make a mushroom picker, and no ABB mushroom farm project has been announced. Its robots already work on the packing side of fresh food, though. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot that picks light items off a moving conveyor, and ABB's PickMaster software ties it to a camera so it can find each piece. A cell like that could fill punnets of mushrooms after harvest, and an IRB 4600 already stacks produce trays at Orora Fresh Packaging in Kingsville, Canada. Lines like these are planned with conveyor tracking and tested first in RobotStudio. Using them for mushrooms remains a possibility.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

Where robotic mushroom harvesting goes next

Mycionics now sells modular machines that farm staff can maintain without specialist technicians, and it adapts them to drawer systems as well as Dutch shelving, working with suppliers such as Limbraco and Christiaens. It is expanding across Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Glibetic's longer goal is a connected industry in which data passes between growers, compost suppliers, spawn makers and climate systems. He has said the technology may move to other crops one day, but for now the focus stays on mushrooms. Oyster and shiitake, grown in bags and on logs, would need different grippers again.

Oyster mushrooms grown in bags on racks in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. Photo: Arne Müseler / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

For homes, mushroom growing is already common in kits on a kitchen counter, and these need no robot. The automation will stay in the farm, where shelves run to the ceiling and crops cannot wait. The open problems are the ones Mycionics hit: picking speed, the price of a machine against the wages it saves, and hardware that copes with humidity and food safety cleaning. The hygienic version of ABB's IRB 1200, made for handling food, shows the kind of design a wet growing room would demand.

An ABB FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster Lite, which links the robot to a camera. Photo: ABB

Skills are the other question. In the hybrid model, pickers become operators who thin, prune, judge quality and keep the machines running, and the farms need people who can read crop data. Mushroom farms in Canada already report job vacancy rates above 12 percent, so the robots are arriving in a trade that already struggles to hire. For an engineer, the downstream half of this line is ordinary ABB work: picking from a belt, packing trays and stacking boxes, the kind of job collected on our ABB robot use cases page.

An ABB IRB 4600 in the Orora Fresh Packaging cell that stacks produce trays in Kingsville, Canada. Photo: ABB

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