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The Story of Kibbutz Alumim & Metomotion

By Moty Schwartz: Chief Operations Officer at MetoMotion

“Starting at the beginning of each row, GRoW picks autonomously, according to the level of ripeness selected by the farmer,” says Moty Schwartz, Chief Operations Officer at MetoMotion. The company was already planning to begin operations in southern Israel when the attack happened.”

Almost a year ago, my company Metomotion received a grant from the Innovation Authority to build a greenhouse to run and evaluate our robot.

Metomotion is a start-up company based in Yokneam Israel. The company designed an Autonomous robot for harvesting tomatoes on the vein in greenhouses. We already have a few robots in Europe.

More than a year ago we were approached by Kibbutz Alumim (about 1 km from Gaza). They understood that they would need automation to increase their efficiency and profitability. At that time, it was too premature on their side to change the infrastructure of the greenhouse.

With the grant from the Innovation Authority, we were looking for a partner that has a greenhouse and grows tomatoes. I met with a few growers, some of whom were closed by our office in Yokneam.  We decided to interest Kibbutz Alumim in the project. The idea was, in their greenhouse to modify 4 dunams and build an infrastructure for the robot. Metomotion and Alumim paid for the infrastructure, Metomotion will bring a robot that will be used for the pilot. The infrastructure was completed by the end of September 2023. By October 15^th, Alumim was scheduled to plant Tomato seedlings.

 

On October 7^th at around 06:30 in the morning, a massive rockets attack together with around 3000 terrorists from Hamas invaded from Gaza to the Kibbitzes and Moshaves in the area, Sderot and Netivot, also to dance festival in nature near Re-eim.

The people of the Kibbutz fought back and were able to push the terrorists back and did not let them enter the Kibbutz, they injured a few people (one of them is Eran the CEO of the vegetable packaging company) and Michael Amar’s son Nitai who was an officer in the IDF was killed while he was driving back to his base as soon as he understood that terrorist invaded Israel (At that time, they all thought the there is only few terrorists. Nobody understood the magnitude). The terrorists in Alumim murdered in cold blood 18 foreign workers (most of them from Thailand).

 

All the kibbutzes were evacuated to hotels in different places in Israel. Alumin is in Natanya and Beery is in the Dead Sea.

As the war is going on, and the people are grieving for the lives of their members of their families or people they knew, also worry about people (old people, women, children, babies together with young people) captured in the hands of the Hamas.

Last week, Metomotion CEO Adi received a phone call from Michael Amar that Kibbutz Alumim together with Kibbutz Be’eri, want to build over 100 dunam greenhouses in Kibbutz Be’eri (on their infrastructure) to grow tomatoes and other vegetables. They want to team up with Metomotion that we will bring harvesting automation for tomatoes first and later to be able to pick other crops. They are looking not only to bring back what was destroyed by the war but also to build state-of-the-art facilities in order to get maximum yield and less reliance on manual labor.

The people whom we are working with (we did have the opportunity yet to meet the guy from Be’eri) last month were under attack, some of their families were slaughtered or kidnapped to Gaza, are able to rise from their grief and think about the future to build up their life from the scraps.

Michael Lost his son.

Eran got shot with 2 bullets in his leg.

The guy from Be’eri: his wife and son got murdered, his daughter was seriously injured, and he lost one leg. (listen to his story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAzPumQnP2A)

 

I guess that makes the Jewish people what they are. We were able to rise from the worth tragedy to build a nation This is what the people from the area are doing. Compare this to our neighbors who lived in the past and complained about what could be there.