Syngenta Vegetable Seeds Announces Partnership With Four Growers; Ruud Kaagman and Brandon Contino Detail
DOWNERS GROVE, IL - The industry is evolving every day before our very eyes, and it’s up to fresh produce allies to grow alongside it. Syngenta Vegetable Seeds is preparing for the future of food production, collaborating with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Four Growers to test the GR-100 robotic harvester in tomato research.
“This collaboration helps serve as a link between genetics and automation,” said Ruud Kaagman, Syngenta Global Crop Unit Head – Tomato. “The success of robotization in the future is the application of robotics with different plant characteristics. With this collaboration, you’ll see varieties adapted to robotic harvesting to enable growers’ success.”
The tech-forward collaboration between Syngenta and Four Growers could lead to faster crop advancements, reduced food waste, and more satisfied growers and consumers.
“Using robotics in agriculture will enable us to eat higher quality, healthier, more affordable produce,” said Brandon Contino, Four Growers' Chief Executive Officer. “Unlike other machines that we see in the field today that harvest every crop (ripe or unripe) in one pass, at Four Growers, our robotics and AI enable us to pick produce individually so that we only harvest those that are perfectly ripe.”
Harvesting robots have the ability to save suppliers time and human resources. Syngenta is including robotics in the research stage of development to pick plant structures that work best with machine harvesting as it looks to evolve alongside the industry.
“Syngenta is developing varieties for the future of our growers, so we need to understand how growers will be running their operations in five to 10 years from now,” Kaagman said. “We will make sure that, when growers move to robotization on a large scale, we have varieties for them that will help them gain efficiencies and added value from robotization.”
Syngenta is also optimizing robots to accelerate variety development and innovation, as robotics and artificial intelligence allow researchers to collect more data points with a higher degree of accuracy than ever before.
Read all about the details of this innovative alliance here.
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