Strawberries are sweet. Known for their bright red color, unique heart-shaped bodies and tart, fruity flesh, they’re the quintessential summer snack.
But strawberries aren’t always as sweet to farmers as they are to consumers. Although growing them can be extremely profitable, it also can be extremely risky. Strawberries are super susceptible to weather, pests and disease, for example, and typically require expensive pesticides that can easily reduce growers’ profit margins. Strawberry prices can be quite volatile, as well, which makes it hard for farmers to forecast supply and demand.
And then there’s labor: Because they’re fragile, strawberries typically must be picked manually. That makes them one of the most labor-intensive row crops there is and can leave farmers vulnerable in the event of worker shortages.
Fortunately, strawberry farming might soon get a lot easier thanks to an unusual strawberry savior: mechanical engineer Robert Pitzer.
After graduating from the University of Florida and serving six years in the U.S. Navy, Pitzer began building a promising civilian career working on semiconductors at Intel. Soon, however, he felt the pull of entrepreneurship. After leaving Intel in 2002, Pitzer therefore helped start and manage a series of intriguing tech startups.
The most recent — AgTech company Harvest CROO, where he serves as chief technical officer and chief engineer — has spent over a decade creating and refining an automated strawberry-picking machine that could revolutionize strawberry harvesting forever.
“This is definitely the hardest thing that we’ve put together,” Pitzer told The Forecast.
Before Berries: BattleBots
The key to successful strawberry harvesting is labor. And in a world where manual workers are becoming harder and harder to come by, the key to labor is often robotics.
Pitzer’s own interest in robotics goes back almost 30 years. In 1997, before he’d even started working at Intel, he started a side business called BotBash, which was dedicated to competitive remote-controlled robots. When television producers Greg Munson and Trey Roski discovered it, they asked Pitzer to be part of a TV show they were developing about robots. The show, which evolved into the beloved series BattleBots, debuted on Comedy Central in 2000.
Pitzer developed the technology that enabled video streaming for both BotBash and BattleBots. Because cloud computing was not yet mainstream, he sent data and video to his company’s central servers, which stored the data for competitors to stream from their own websites.
“Once launched, we quickly saw the need to build a web-based registration and event management software system to manage contestants for the growing events,” Pitzer said. “Eventually, that system was rebuilt, and the foundation is still used today to manage [robotics competitions in schools].”
Pitzer’s team reached an exciting milestone while working on BattleBots in 2002: They designed the robots featured in a famous Anheuser Busch Super Bowl commercial.
“We made the Budweiser Super Bowl commercial, not knowing if it would ever see the light of day,” Pitzer said. “But it ended up being the first commercial played after kickoff and one of the most popular for the Super Bowl.”
Picking Bigger Profits
While he was still working on BattleBots, Pitzer left Intel to start a technology consulting company where he met Gary Wishnatzki, the owner of a large strawberry farm.
Wishnatzki, who eventually co-founded Harvest CROO with Pitzer, owned a strawberry marketing business for 20 years and partnered with Pitzer on a project related to tracking strawberries coming from the field. One of their many conversations turned to the question of whether it was possible to mechanize the entire strawberry farm — especially the harvesting process.
“An unappreciated part of the process is what happens to the strawberries after they are picked,” Pitzer said. “Many people don’t realize that when you buy strawberries in the store, they’re in those little plastic clamshells, and the berries were put in the clamshells by the people who actually pulled them off the plant.”
Because the industry had not evolved in over 50 years, many farmers were resistant to change. Nevertheless, labor was a challenge they couldn’t ignore.
Consider one of Harvest CROO’s primary farming partners: The farm has more than 850 acres and typically brings in more than 800 foreign workers in a season to pick its harvest. Because of the expense of transporting workers from Mexico, providing housing and food, and paying a fair wage — often over $50 an hour — labor can constitute up to 60% of the cost of growing. And to make matters worse, many workers quit after only a few days because they’re not used to the hard physical labor of harvesting berries. The resulting turnover and labor shortages sometimes lead to crops spoiling, unpicked, in the fields.
To help strawberry growers address their labor challenges, Pitzer and Wishnatzki spent eight years brainstorming ways to mechanize harvesting and make strawberry growing more cost-effective overall. Pitzer describes the Harvest CROO system they came up with as a mobile factory that handles everything from picking and inspecting to washing, sanitizing and packing. After completing these tasks, the system cools the berries in an insulated cooler on wheels, allowing growers to store them for a few hours before transferring them.
The system is so promising that over 70% of the U.S. strawberry growing industry has invested in Harvest CROO, according to Pitzer, who credits his work on BattleBots with helping him develop the harvester.
“With BattleBots, it was so interesting to see the creativity and techniques that participants came up with,” Pitzer said.
“But the biggest thing was the material technology — with guys building robots out of aluminum, steel, titanium or other exotic materials — that was completely survivable. While they were remote-controlled, they were not autonomous robots. With our harvesters, they are fully autonomous. You push a button on the pad, tell it what field and what row to go to, and then it drives out there to start picking the strawberries.”
Embracing AI
The latest version of Harvest CROO’s technology relies heavily on artificial intelligence, which it uses alongside computer vision to scan each berry on a plant to determine if it’s ripe, healthy and ready to be picked. Just like a consumer would do at the grocery store.
But AI has created challenges as well as opportunities, according to Pitzer, who said Harvest CROO has sometimes struggled to acquire the compute power it needs to power its AI-driven system. Fortunately, recent improvements in technology — including more powerful processors — have made it easier to put his system into action, he said, adding that the technology CROO uses today wasn’t available even five years ago.
To get the compute power his company needs, Pitzer uses a video partner to run the robots and their AI-powered cameras, combining computer vision with edge computing.
“We couldn’t use full HD processing to find the strawberries because it would take multiple seconds per frame,” Pitzer said. “We recently began running full AI using new Warren processors from Nvidia, so we can now run full AIs that are significantly high frame rate and HD. It gets better and better week by week. It’s amazing to me that our systems are so fast that we can look at a berry and tell exactly which plant it’s on.”
A Turn Toward Data-Powered Farming
Harvest CROO isn’t just revolutionizing strawberry harvesting. It’s helping to transform all of agriculture by making the business case for AgTech, suggested Pitzer, who said he sees the entire farming industry react to AgTech innovations like his own by making more and better use of data. Many farmers previously did not realize how much data they can gather from their fields, he noted. And if they did, they didn’t know how to use the data to improve their farming.
“Farmers are starting to see more and more what they can do with their data, such as row cropping,” Pitzer said. “They’re using all sorts of heat maps and everything to try to map what’s going on in the fields.”
Harvest CROO also will delve deeper into data in the near future, according to Pitzer. He said his harvesters already know down to the centimeter where plants are in the field. With evolved technology, he can now create heat maps across fields that show how plants in one area are producing more berries than plants in another area. Farmers could use that kind of information to investigate the reasons for the disparity and work to improve berry production across all their acreage.
The Future of Robotic Harvesting
Of course, strawberries aren’t unique. Farmers growing all types of fruits, vegetables and grains face similar challenges. For that reason, Harvest CROO might eventually develop the same kinds of robotic harvesters for other crops that it already has developed for strawberries, Pitzer said.
The high cost of strawberries, however, makes them the best place to start: Once an industry starts undergoing transformation through mechanization, it becomes increasingly clear which techniques and technologies work best. Once that happens, the cost of the technologies begins to come down. It’s only a matter of time, then, before mechanization makes it cheaper to grow strawberries and consume them.
Concluded Pitzer, “I made semiconductors. I’ve done pharmaceutical equipment. I used to build nuclear submarines in the Navy. I’d say this is definitely the hardest thing that we’ve put together.”
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Jennifer Goforth Gregory is a contributing writer. Find her on X @byJenGregory.
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