An Ontario company is taking aim at two diverse but related challenges — back pain and labour efficiency.
Ottawa’s Tandem Robotics said its Taro Cobot is designed to ease physical strains on farmers and increase efficiency at the Woodstock show.
The machine allows its users to lie flat as they trundle down the field, alleviating the strain of planting, weeding and other field tasks.
“It saves the farmer’s back, the farmer’s knees, the farmer’s necks, pretty much, because they’re not having to stand up and sit down a million times,” said Rola Elghonimy, Tandem’s technical sales engineer.
WHY IT MATTERS
Lower back pain is a major health concern for Canadian farmers.
Firsthand experience
Tandem grew out of predecessor company Apidae Systems, which focused on monitoring farm data and packaging it into a dashboard for producers.
During a presentation at the Ag Tech Breakfast at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show, Ming Chen, co-founder of Apidae and Tandem said while volunteering on farms with Apidae he and colleagues noticed physical challenges many farmers faced in their work, as well as consistent labour issues.
Elghonimy added, “We’d help for like an hour or two, and then it would take us three days to recover from the back pain from just the hour or two of helping.”
The back pain made the point. So did the labour shortages the team saw on farm after farm.
“That’s when we actually pivoted to building robots to reduce that labour need, specifically we focus on vegetables and berries because those are some of the most labour intensive,” Chen said.
Elghonimy said some farmers with 50- to 100-acre farms were only growing food on 10 to 15 acres, often due to shortages in manual labour.
“We’re losing out on a lot of our sovereignty,” she said. “We could be growing a lot more food that is needed.”
The Cobot, which resembles a moon rover crossed with a massage bed, is designed with the aim of increasing efficiency through better ergonomics.
Elghonimy said the machine makes weeding four times faster and transplanting and harvesting produce an average of two- to 2.5-times faster.
Easier planting and weeding can translate to more acres being seeded and a better return on investment.
“A lot of people are saying that they’re going to fall asleep using it, but what I’ve been saying is, if you’re finishing your work four times as fast, you can afford a little nap,” Elghonimy said.
Tandem has been testing the units on vegetable plots, as well as on organic crops which need to be hand-weeded.
What producers should know
Elghonimy said Tandem has worked closely with producers to make the best system possible.
“We’ve gotten a lot of positive and negative feedback. Positive feedback, we’ve loved. Negative feedback, we’ve implemented. We’ve fixed everything.”
This included improving the headstand and adding adjustable height.
Elghonimy said farmers interested in using the Taro Cobot work closely with Tandem before purchase, to ensure the best possible fit.
“Your robot is not exactly like the robot of your neighbour farmer,” she said. “We have to work with you to figure out what size containers you need, what width your rows are at.”
Farmers also have full right to repair on the machines.
“It’s completely fine if they want to change something,” Elghonimy said. “That’s why we work with them for a few weeks, up to a month, in the pre-sale phase, to actually make sure that we’re giving them a product that is as customized as possible to their needs.”
She said presales are starting for the Cobot now, with regular sales expected to begin in November.
Read our full coverage of Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show 2026 here.
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