IRVINE, CA - The marriage between agriculture and technology may be an unconventional one, but it is powerful nonetheless. Aiming to outline the differences between the two, Burro Chief Executive Officer Charlie Andersen recently shared his insights in the latest episode of Voices of the Valley, a podcast hosted by Dennis Donohue, the Director of Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology, and Candace Wilson, Vice President of Business Development at GreenVenus.
“Growers versus technologists are two very distinctly different worlds,” Andersen said. “People that grow up on a farm, they know how to hustle. They are reacting on the fly to something. Things are outside of their control, but they have to make it happen regardless. People in the technology domain tend to get focused on the hardest problems. In our case, we have both of those perspectives within our team, and there can be tension between the two viewpoints, for sure, but that leads to a product that is farm-compatible but still very technology-driven.”
The episode release comes on the heels of Burro closing a $10.9 million Series A round of funding, a press release noted. Andersen said his company is set to meet the needs of growers, even as those needs are constantly changing and nearly impossible to predict.
Burro, which won the AgSharks competition sponsored by S2G Ventures and Western Growers in 2018, leverages technology that Andersen describes as “Disney’s Wall-E in a 1.0 format for agriculture.” The company’s autonomous cart can be used to haul crops like table grapes, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and nursery crops out from the field.
“Building robots to go out into the world is really, really, really hard,” Andersen said. “You have to build a lot, you have to fail a lot. Separately, people are really, really, really good at doing a lot of flexible stuff on the fly in unstructured outdoor areas…our company thesis has been, for one, technology is all about the people. You’re not going to have fields with nobody in them whatsoever and just robots operating in quiet. We’re a long way from that. If we think that in 20–30 years we’re going to have robots do most tasks, the question becomes: How do you start with something functional today and build toward that world?”
For more on the topic, be sure to check out the episode here.
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