[AgTech Rising] MetaFarmers CEO Lee Gyu-hwa: “The Next Generation of Farmers Will Be Robots… Leading Full-Cycle Automation”

The agricultural produce harvesting sector is not an area that agricultural robots can easily penetrate. That is because there are many variables, such as different environments at every farm and various crop types, different sizes even within the same crop, and harvest timing that is difficult to judge. Since crop damage during a robot’s harvesting process can negatively affect farm income, developing robots capable of delicate work is essential.

There is a startup that has jumped into this field. That company is MetaFarmers, a domestic leader in the crop-harvesting robot field(CEO Lee Gyu-hwa). MetaFarmers was founded in 2022 by four young people from Seoul National University who majored in robotics and AI vision in the mechanical engineering department. We met with CEO Lee Gyu-hwa to talk about the current state of harvesting robot development and more.

The next generation of farmers will be robots… engineers heading to farms to solve labor shortages
The reason CEO Lee Gyu-hwa focused on ‘agricultural robots’ among countless advanced technology fields was clear. It was because of his conviction that this is the field with the greatest social urgency.

CEO Lee Gyu-hwa emphasized, "The rural labor shortage I saw in the news as a child is still one of the most serious social problems even now, when technology has advanced dramatically. The average age of the farming population has already passed a critical point, and foreign workers are also avoiding agricultural sites for various reasons. Amid a sense of crisis that the food industry directly tied to food security could collapse, we were confident that we could definitely solve this problem with our technology.".

'MetaFarmers' fully reflects the aspirations of these young engineering students. Containing the meaning of Beyond Farmers(Farmers), it aims for a new form of agriculture built together by people and robots, while also symbolizing a paradigm shift that 'the next generation of farmers will be robots'. Their core value is to help people focus on higher-value work such as cultivation decision-making, branding, and developing sales channels while robots take over the grueling and difficult harvesting work.

'99% recognition rate  Differentiating itself from other companies’ robots with proprietary grippers and universal SW
MetaFarmers’ key weapon is its autonomous-driving-based strawberry·and cucumber-harvesting robot. An AI vision camera mounted on the robot scans objects to determine the ripeness of fruit and proceeds with harvesting while avoiding obstacles.

In the market, MetaFarmers’ robots are evaluated as having greater versatility and precision than existing manual harvesting or competitors’ robots. Unlike existing robots that perform only a single task on a single crop, MetaFarmers directly built universal software that can be flexibly applied to multiple crops and various tasks.

In particular, it stands out for having developed its core hardware, the 'robot hand' (gripper) in-house. In strawberry greenhouses where leaves and fruit are densely packed, a precise gripper capable of reaching into narrow spaces is essential, and in the case of cucumbers, the robot must reproduce with one arm the human 'two-hand task' of holding with one hand and cutting with the other in the space between stems.

According to current field demonstration data, crop recognition and classification accuracy reaches 99%. The actual harvesting success rate is around 80% . Excluding the limited areas (20%) where crops are completely hidden behind leaves or physically unreachable by the robot arm, this means it can harvest most crops in the field perfectly.

CEO Lee Gyu-hwa explained, "When harvesting cucumbers, skilled workers miss 5%, while unskilled workers miss about 20% of the crop, but our robot has now reached a level where it can completely replace unskilled labor," adding, "Based on the same amount of time, our robot is fully doing the work of 1~1.5 people." MetaFarmers has currently supplied two harvesting robots to a cucumber farm in Jincheon(iCOOP).

It is also conducting demonstration work on a strawberry-harvesting robot at a smart greenhouse of about 5,400 pyeong in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province(SP Agri). MetaFarmers is creating an efficient farm operating process that connects harvesting-sorting-delivery by deploying robots while humans handle other tasks during the day and in the early morning hours.

Farm economic analysis:  considering annual labor costs, "2 years is enough to recover the investment"
Even the most advanced robot is useless if it lacks ‘economic feasibility’. Because it requires spending tens of millions of won, economic viability must be examined even more carefully. Accordingly, MetaFarmers calculated the labor-cost replacement value from introducing its robots.

According to CEO Lee Gyu-hwa, the annual labor cost per foreign worker is 30 million won (including room and board)~40 million won (excluding room and board) . Considering the cost of a harvesting robot (about 70 million won), the fact that it can operate 24 hours a day, and its 5-year service life, the analysis found that the investment could be recovered within 2~2.5 years.

CEO Lee Gyu-hwa said, "Considering rising labor costs and labor shortages, I believe it is sufficiently worth the investment," adding, "If government subsidies are available, the payback period would shrink to about 1 year.".

In fact, according to the National Data Portal’s survey on production costs for paddy rice(rice) , labor costs, which were 100,335 won in 2010, rose to 204,769 won in 2025, more than doubling. Hired labor costs per head of Korean beef cattle(based on a 600kg live fattening steer) also rose from 19,000 won in 2010 to 41,000 won in 2025. As the share of labor costs in farm operating expenses continues to rise, attempts to reduce costs through robot adoption in rural areas are being cited as a practical alternative for securing farms’ self-sustainability.

In addition, MetaFarmers has proposed a subscription-based (RaaS) model for farms burdened by upfront costs. By allowing farms to adopt robots in subscription form for several months and experience tangible productivity gains and labor-cost savings first-hand, it lowered the barrier to entry so they can make a rational purchase decision afterward.

However, for conventional open-field farms or ordinary plastic greenhouses with outdated facilities rather than smart greenhouses, there are limitations to immediate adoption because it is difficult to secure autonomous driving paths for robots. Lee said, "To demonstrate 100% of the robot’s performance, a standardized cultivation environment at farms must come first," adding, "We are considering ways to lower the initial barrier to entry.".
 

MetaFarmers’ technology is moving beyond harvesting toward full-cycle automation, including seedling planting, and packaging. Through a national project(multi-ministerial package program), the company plans to complete development of leaf-removal (defoliation) and fruit-thinning (thinning) technologies by next year. If defoliation work, which requires the most labor from farms, is automated, crop management efficiency is expected to be maximized.

CEO Lee Gyu-hwa explained, "The global agricultural labor market, worth 600 trillion won annually, has different crops in every country and far too many unautomated, untapped areas," adding, "We are currently continuing demonstrations on cucumbers·and tomatoes in a greenhouse at the Sangju Innovation Valley, and we are developing a user app that can be controlled by smartphone." He continued, "Targeting the fruit-tree market including apples, we will expand into harvesting and fruit-thinning technologies using humanoid dual-arm robots, apply them to other fruit trees as well, and lead automation innovation in the global fruit vegetable·and orchard market.".