Costa Group to Start Deploying Arugga’s Pollination Robots Across Australian Tomato Fields

By CTech

The Costa Group, Australia’s leading grower of hydroponic glasshouse tomatoes, has signed an agreement with Israeli-based Arugga to deploy its pollination robots across 10 hectares of Costa’s glasshouse tomato crop.

Costa’s tomatoes are grown in one of Australia’s largest and most advanced glasshouse facilities in the New South Wales town of Guyra. In total, Costa’s current Guyra glasshouses have 302,400 square meters of growing area, and during peak production contain more than one million plants. The company is in the process of increasing its production area by 33% to 40%.

Founded in 2017, Arugga develops robotic solutions to treat and monitor individual plants in greenhouses. The company has focused its early product development on robotic pollination to replace manual methods and bumblebees. It is a portfolio company of the Smart Agro R&D partnership.

According to Dganit Vered, Smart Agro CEO, “The Israeli agro-tech industry is experiencing significant momentum, alongside the growth in the world’s population, and taking into account the shortage in resources like water, land, and bees. The continuous war against plant diseases requires creative technological solutions. I believe that the introduction of innovative technologies like Arugga’s will provide a real solution for the existing problems in the global market of greenhouse agriculture,” she said.