WESTLAND, the Netherlands — The robot took four seconds to decide that the tomato was ripe, another second to cup it in a soft rubber gripper, and a final half-second to snip the stem. Then it rolled 30 centimeters down the heating pipe that doubles as a rail and started again. A human picker beside it, working the opposite side of the row, was roughly three times as fast.
“Three years ago it was 10 times as fast, and the robot dropped one in five,” said Pieter van Leeuwen, who grows 14 hectares of vine tomatoes under glass here in Westland, the region south of The Hague that holds some 9,000 hectares of greenhouses. “Now it drops one in 50 and it works at night. I will take that trade.”
Mr. Van Leeuwen is one of 12 growers in the district running a combined 60 harvesting robots this season, up from a handful of trial units in 2024, according to the regional growers’ association. The machines, built by a Dutch start-up and a larger German equipment maker, cost about 180,000 euros each, and the growers say a single unit replaces roughly 1.5 seasonal workers across a nine-month harvest.
The shift has less to do with a breakthrough than with arithmetic. Labor accounts for about 35 percent of a Dutch greenhouse’s costs, and the seasonal workers who once came from Poland and Romania are increasingly staying home as wages there rise. The association estimates the district was short 4,000 pickers this summer.
Fenna de Groot, a robotics engineer at Wageningen University & Research who has worked on greenhouse harvesting for a decade, said the hard problem was never the gripper. “It is the occlusion. Leaves, stems, other tomatoes, condensation on the lens,” she said. “The cameras got cheaper and the models got better at guessing what is behind a leaf. That is the whole story.” Picking accuracy on ripe fruit now reaches 94 percent in her trials, she said, against 78 percent three years ago.
The workers who remain are watching with mixed feelings. Andrei Munteanu, 34, who has come from Romania for seven seasons, said the robots had taken the night shift and the lowest rows, the ones that hurt his back. “Good,” he said. “But I know what comes next. Next year it takes the day.”
Mr. Van Leeuwen does not dispute that. He expects to run 10 robots by 2028 and to employ about half as many seasonal pickers, retaining those who can maintain the machines. “The job becomes mechanic, not picker,” he said. “Andrei is already the best mechanic I have, he just does not know it yet.”
Outside, in the low October light, the glass stretched to the horizon in every direction, a landscape that has been engineered for a century to grow more food with less of everything. Labor, the growers say, is simply the latest input to be optimized.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 3 of the European edition with the headline: In the Netherlands’ Glass City, Robots Are Finally Learning to Pick a Tomato Without Crushing It.
