Nowadays, when people think of the future of farming, they usually start with robots.

And why not? In apple growing, labor has become one of the biggest cost pressures, and as farm worker wages have doubled in some places over the past decade, the economics just aren’t penciling out.

But if you ask Neal Carter, creating the farms of the future goes beyond simply embracing more and more automation. The founder and CEO of Okanagan Specialty Fruits, Carter has spent the past three decades thinking about apples as the creator of the Arctic apple, the nonbrowning apple designed to reduce waste and make sliced apples easier to use in food service and other applications. Now, after buying back the company he and his wife Louisa founded in 1996, Carter is thinking holistically about how digital tools and genetic engineering need to work together to create the future farm.

I caught up with Carter recently to interview him about his next act, and we ended up talking about where he sees plant breeding, gene-edited crops, and farm automation going. According to Carter, farmers are struggling and more advanced plant breeding is necessary, but you need to do it with the future of the farm, robots and all, in mind.

“It’s not robots,” Carter told me in a recent interview. “Genetics is part of ag tech, right?”

That sentence gets straight to the heart of Carter’s farm-of-the-future thesis that he laid out last year in a white paper. According to Carter, while much of the conversation around agricultural automation has focused on building machines that can navigate the complexity of today’s farms, we should also be asking: What if we changed the crop so the machines had an easier job?

Carter points to today’s apple orchards, where even modern high-density orchards are still not well suited to full automation. They require extensive pruning, trellising, ladders or platforms, and large amounts of seasonal labor. The fruit is spread across a tree architecture that makes robotic picking difficult, expensive, and inefficient.

Instead, Carter’s vision is to use genome editing to create apple trees that bear fruit on new wood each year, allowing orchards to be trained more like grapevines than traditional apple trees. These trees could be trained along a simple horizontal cordon wire, concentrating the fruit zone at one level and making it easier for autonomous equipment to prune, spray, monitor, and harvest.

In the white paper, OSF estimates this type of orchard architecture could save $8,000 to $10,000 per acre over current production costs of $14,000 to $16,000 per acre.

Gaining these types of savings is increasingly important in agriculture writ large, not just apples, because the economics of farming have become so brutally difficult. By using more automation, and creating crops that are tailored to be more efficiently harvested via automation, Carter thinks we can essentially create a long-term survival path for farmers of the future.

In our conversation, he pointed to how current farm operators are working on such thin margins that they are perilously close to always going out of business, meaning at some point many of them likely will.

“Something has to change, you know,” Carter said. “Big big companies are going broke. Every week, another one going under.”

For Carter, that something is not just adding more automation to the current orchard. It is building a new production system from the ground up.

“We need a whole new production system,” he said.

The way he envisions genetics being adapted is to make the apple tree more compatible with automation. He envisions gene-edited trees where fruit is concentrated in a smaller and more predictable harvest zone, where the machine does not have to search a large, three-dimensional tree for apples hidden at different heights and angles.

Carter believes his baby, the Arctic apple, would be a perfect candidate to adapt to this new vision of farming, in part because its resistance to enzymatic browning would allow it to better tolerate the superficial bruising that might come with more aggressive mechanical harvesting.

“You literally could just go suck all the apples off the tree,” Carter said. “You could have 10 of them out there working at a time, they’re all autonomous, and they just straddle that small trellis and suck the apples off and run them into a bin. Done.”

According to Carter, he hadn’t planned on getting back into being an entrepreneur once he sold the company a decade ago, but when OSF’s owners approached him about a management-led buyout roughly a year ago, he eventually came around to the idea. Now, he envisions a future OSF where he can use modern tools to reimagine what farming could look like.

And that future includes more than just apples. Carter said the company has experience in 20 crops, including cherries, apricots, peaches, blueberries, grapes, avocados, tomatoes, lettuce, bananas, and others. In the future, he believes OSF would rather work through partnerships where another company brings the germplasm and commercial channel while OSF acts as the breeding and biotech engine.

“We can be their breeding program,” Carter said.

Earlier in the interview, Carter summed up the buyback this way: “We’re excited to have this company back and to drive it further and farther and faster.”

You can watch and listen to our full conversation below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.