Burro, a provider of autonomous robots for work outdoors, has announced a material expansion of their autonomous robot fleet with Petitti Family Farms in Lake County, Ohio.
This expansion is the largest of its kind, running autonomous mobile robots outdoors, year-round in the challenging conditions of northern Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie.
Petitti Family Farms is expanding their fleet of Burro Grande robots from 10 that were deployed earlier this year to 25 by the end of the year.
The core workflows for the Burro Grandes are towing heavy payloads of plants and plant materials (up to 5,000 lbs) across sprawling farms of over 400 acres.
With this expansion, the team intends to add new workflows for autonomous spraying and other applications that are especially challenging for their employees.
Charlie Andersen, co-founder and CEO of Burro, says: “Petitti Family Farms has over 4,000 production acres. They produce and ship tens of millions of plants each year.
“And you can throw a rock into Lake Erie from Ridge Manor (site of initial Burro deployment). They have sudden, extreme weather conditions.
“It’s really dynamic – mud, snow, ice, wind, condensation, foot traffic, equipment traffic, seasonality, constantly changing lighting conditions – to name a few. And the stakes are high. If there happens to be a storm during peak season, shipments still need to leave the dock.”
Overcoming the environmental conditions was only one piece of the puzzle. Burro also had to prove the business case.
Petitti Family Farms partnered with Burro with the goal to “achieve greater scalability and set new benchmarks for productivity and quality”, according to Joe Allio, president of Petitti Family Farms.
Allio says: “We started with 10 Burro Grandes at our Ridge Manor farm. By the end of the first week, we knew there was no going back.
“The most encouraging thing was how quickly our employees adopted the robots. They were excited and took to them right away. Our team was running them on their own, and the Burros were doing real production work, effectively right out of the box.”
The future of work outdoors
Andersen says: “Our customers face severe and costly labor shortages, and profitability is challenged like never before.
“The only way that agriculture and other labor-intensive industries will be viable long-term in the US is to boost productivity per employee with automation, AI, and other technologies.”
This evolution is well under way in the supply chain logistics and manufacturing sectors, where robotics and automation have been widely adopted indoors. Burro is spearheading a similar movement with physical AI, helping to solve an acute shortage in the $1.2 trillion outdoor labor market.
Burro’s approach to developing the future of work outdoors has been to stay hyper-focused on the user experience.
Burro robots have run over 800,000 hours and 175,000 miles of autonomous operations – from rural Australia and New Zealand, to central Texas summers, tropical storms in Florida, sub-zero temperatures in the Northeast, and California sunshine.
That experience provides Burro a unique advantage in identifying and executing on the highest priority needs for its customers.
Burro robots have traveled the equivalent of multiple laps around the globe in 2025 alone, all while capturing terabytes of data to train their AI and machine learning models.
Burro’s AI continuously captures millions of “scenes” every day – complete snapshots of people, plants, terrain, weather, and other unpredictable conditions.
Because outdoor industrial environments are always changing, this proprietary dataset of real-world variability powers Burro’s learning systems and provides a unique edge.
Only the beginning
Ryan Clifford, senior vice president at Burro, says: “We see this partnership as the blueprint for the farm of the future. Small teams of upskilled workers, working hand in hand with larger fleets of autonomous robots.
“Rather than an employee driving a tractor on a tedious 10-minute one-way trip, out in the elements – they take less than 10 seconds to choose a destination and send the Burro there autonomously. Do that ten times an hour, and you’ve added a ton of productivity.”
Clifford says: “It didn’t take long for Angelo (Petitti) and Joe (Allio) to see the potential. But we had to demonstrate our reliability and scalability before they would commit to this expansion.
“We had to prove ourselves in the real world, before they were comfortable making Burro a business-critical part of their operation.”
Allio says: “At this point, we’ve established a trusted partnership with the Burro team. This new commitment further establishes our long-term partnership with Burro.
“Given our size and scale, we think we could use 50 or more Burros across all of our operations. This is only the beginning.”
