Four Growers: Using Robotics to Make the Right Pick!

After years of research and development, Four Growers’ harvesting platform, the GR-100, has transformed early farm adopters’ operations, preventing hundreds of thousands of tomatoes from rotting on the vine. For people who are living in Pittsburgh, there’s a real chance that they may have already eaten a tomato that was picked by the GR-100 system! Now, with their recent expansion into cucumber harvesting, Four Growers is excited to be making another positive impact for another healthy vegetable.

Four Growers is a group of entrepreneurs, technologists, engineers and innovators who are passionate about solving the most challenging issues within the food production industry. Co-founders Brandon Contino and Dan Chi completed their undergraduate degrees at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering.

“From the start, my co-founder and I were captivated by global food systems and driven to create products that enhance food production sustainability,” Contino says. “After extensive customer discovery rounds, we found our niche in the greenhouse industry, with a focus on usingrobotics technology to reduce operational costs.

“Since day one, our mission has remained constant: to make fresh and affordable produce accessible to all. We firmly believe that, to meet the growing market demands, the way we cultivate food must undergo a fundamental transformation, ushering in a new era of innovation to enhance both the quality and quantity of our food supply.”

Their company’s name reflects their commitment to ushering in the fourth agricultural revolution. Contino says that it symbolizes their dedication to pioneering innovative solutions in agriculture, especially those like greenhouses that are growing in all four seasons.

Contino describes AI and machine learning as core competencies at Four Growers.

“The custom architectures and datasets we’ve developed are the backbone that enables our GR-100 platform to operate as effectively as it does,”
Contino explains. “The organic nature of crops means that it can be very challenging to hardcode preset rules for every single variation, and this has been one of the largest challenges that was slowing the development of automation for more complex agricultural applications. Being on the cutting edge of recent developments in AI and machine learning at university, we saw how this new technology could be applied to solve the challenges that were previously unsolvable.”

“Since day one, our mission has remained constant: to make fresh and affordable produce accessible to all. We firmly believe that, to meet the growing market demands, the way we cultivate food must undergo a fundamental transformation, ushering in a new era of innovation to enhance both the quality and quantity of our food supply.”

Their AI and machine learning began with harvesting applications, but because of the generalizability of their solutions, Four Growers is now taking the data they extract from their models and using it to provide additional insights to growers for things like yield heat maps and yield prediction.

“We see so many untapped opportunities where innovation and technology combine to revolutionize the way we approach agriculture, bringing forth a new era of abundance and sustainability,” Contino says. “We believe that by harnessing the power of automation and analytics, we can unlock unprecedented potential in agriculture and hope that these technologies become widely adopted so that we can continue to drive down the operational costs of modern agriculture and improve the quality and yields. “

“Our dream is that we’re able to see a day where high-quality, nutritious food is within reach for everyone.”