Source: Spectrum News 1 (Triangle/Sandhills), September 8, 2026 — reported by Kennedy Chase. Read the original story
Spectrum News 1 visited AGEYE in Raleigh for a look at how artificial intelligence and autonomous robotics are being used to grow produce indoors — and why a sealed, instrumented environment produces a cleaner, more predictable crop than an open field.
The segment walks through the full cycle inside an AGEYE farm: crops grown in vertically stacked racks under controlled light, water, and nutrients, with cameras and sensors capturing plant-level data throughout the grow. AGEYE's systems reach harvest in roughly 21 to 24 days — about half the time of a comparable outdoor cycle — and the produce grown on the platform already reaches customers as far away as the Ritz-Carlton in Dubai.
Speaking to Spectrum News, AGEYE co-founder and CEO Nick Genty described what continuous plant-level measurement makes possible:
"We track every single metric about plants that we capture… we can quickly determine where the microclimates are, where there's potential issues for pathogens, mold and mildew."
He also described the degree of automation involved:
"The entire system is automated seed to sale… completely hands off, done by robotics."
That combination — measurement dense enough to catch a microclimate before it becomes a crop loss, and automation that removes hands from the process entirely — is the case AGEYE has been making for food safety. As Genty put it in the segment, conventional produce has "a lot of ways that's contaminated. By the time it gets harvested all the way to the time it gets to your plate."
Watch or read the full report at Spectrum News 1.
