Naturipe Berry Growers has announced that it has invested in Harvest Croo Robotics, a company looking to fill the growing labour supply gap with new technologies for the agriculture industry.
According to Harvest Croo, Naturipe's investment means that more than 20 per cent of the US strawberry industry has now invested in the robotics company.
“The lack of availability of labour to harvest strawberries is one of the great challenges facing our industry,” said Rich Amirsehhi, president and chief executive of Naturipe Berry Growers. “Harvest Croo Robotics’ technology to harvest berries has tremendous promise to solve this critical problem.”
Harvest Croo Robotics continues to develop and test the latest technology for agricultural robotics.
The company will test its latest prototype during the Florida strawberry season, which begins in November. Improvements include harvest speed and the development of an autonomous mobile platform that will carry the robotic pickers through the field.
After berries are picked, they will be transferred overhead to the platform level, where they will be inspected and packed into consumer units by delta robots. The development of packing robots, next year, will mark another key milestone in Harvest Croo Robotics’ technological advances.
“The technology is prepared to make a major leap this coming season,” said Bob Pitzer, co-founder and chief technology officer of Harvest Croo. “We were at commercial speed, last March, at a rate of eight seconds to pick a plant. Now by using embedded processors and a streamlined picking head design, we expect to easily cut that time in half.”
“Naturipe Berry Growers sees joining this collaborative effort as an important step in ensuring the sustainability of the US strawberry industry and putting our growers in a position to be early adopters of the technology,” Amirsehhi added.
