UPDATES FROM THE WGCIT The Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology was created to link Western Growers members with innovators in the agtech space. Below are news updates from the Center’s startups:
Carbon Robotics, the global leader in laser weeding, surpassed $100 million in revenue last year. LaserWeeders have been adopted by organic and conventional growers across 15 countries to reduce costs, address labor shortages and farm more sustainably. Powered by Carbon AI and a proprietary Large Plant Model (LPM) trained on more than 150 million labeled plants across three continents, LaserWeeders can start weeding any field or crop in minutes. As adoption grows, Carbon Robotics is transforming the way the world farms, helping growers reduce weed control costs while improving crop quality and yield for a more sustainable and profitable future. Intelligistics highlights the critical importance of pre-cooling in the produce supply chain, noting that the first four to eight hours after harvest are often the most expensive and consequential. Pre-cooling directly determines shelf life, shrink and ultimately margin. Yet many operations still rely on fixed cooling times, operator judgment and occasional temperature spot checks, which can lead to inconsistent results. When pre-cooling varies, it can shorten shelf life, increase shrink, soften arrivals, promote microbial growth and even lead to rejected loads. The solution is replacing guesswork with data-driven insights that ensure consistent cooling while improving throughput. Overcooling also carries costs, including excess energy consumption, longer room occupancy, reduced throughput and additional labor checks. As the company emphasizes, pre-cooling is no longer just a sales issue—it is fundamentally a quality and margin issue. Their technology aims to eliminate variability, remove guesswork and prevent both over- and under- cooling in produce operations. Cerena for Grower Shippers, part of iTradeNetwork’s Cerena Solution Suite, centralizes orders, pricing, catalog and traceability data into one connected workflow, giving your team a single source of truth across buyers and partners. This improves order accuracy, reduces disputes and accelerates order-to- cash. Built specifically for grower shippers, our AI-powered Order Agent eliminates manual PO entry by capturing, validating and routing inbound orders from email, PDFs or scans directly into your OMS and ERP systems. The result is fewer errors, faster fulfillment and the ability to scale volume without adding headcount. With real-time visibility and standardized data across workflows, you can meet compliance requirements faster, resolve exceptions earlier and strengthen buyer relationships without increasing operational complexity or risk. To learn more, contact us at sales@itradenetwork.com or visit www.itradenetwork.com. KipTraq recently rolled out ‘Brandi,’ our AI assistant built into KipTraq. She can be tasked with summarizing data and comments from thousands of inspections into a concise, English (or Spanish) briefing, which can then be automatically emailed to your team on a set schedule. You can prompt her with specific rules, priorities and goals, so that the summary you get is helpful and highlights things your team needs to address. KipTraq customers are taking advantage of our new Workflow system, which automates follow-up based on your rules. See a problem with a field or with a piece of equipment? It automatically assigns a task to the right parties with the details of the problem, sets a deadline and can email reminders if need be. Best of all: This functionality is 100 percent user configurable and works both in-field and in-plant. Learn more at KipTraq.com.
Carbon Robotics
Intelligistics
iTradeNetwork
KipTraq
61 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com April – June 2026
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