In 2015, a fellow grower challenged our approach to asparagus harvest when he referred to our 5 man carts as old fashioned. He was using 3 man carts and suggested that they were so much more efficient. We had been using 5 man carts on our farms for almost 60 years. We asked ourselves , if a 3 man cart is more efficient than a 5 man cart, why wouldn’t a 1 man cart be even more efficient? In 2015, we gave the 1 man cart a trial run using 4 carts imported from Europe. While we were frustrated with how these particular units operated we were amazed at the results. Consistently, the employees on these 1 man carts were harvesting between 1.8 – 2.25 more acres as an employee on a 3 or a 5 man cart. The concept works and we proved it in our own fields! In the spring of 2016, and after months of design and engineering work, we built 30 Mantis carts and put them to work in asparagus fields in Canada and the U.S. The Mantis carts work and they work well! In our own fields, employees improved their productivity by as much as 250% compared to employees on 5 man carts.