Robotic Farming

Traditional agriculture is on the brink of a massive shift towards autonomy with machine learning robots doing the bulk of all the harvesting. Say hello to a robot designed to scan and test conditions of corn lettuce, a harvester that autonomously slices with water, a robot that hoes Amin, a robotic arm to pick apples. You get. It there everywhere. But as cool as these are many are still in very early research or development your tip-off with the computer on the field. They are not as dustproof as you'd hope. We're in the lab at Blue River Technology to talk about its farm BOTS, their computer vision-based field machine designed to weed lettuce rose. It got its start because thinning out lettuce rows is normally a labor and time-intensive process. They want to have a plant about every 10 inches so that a lettuce head confirmed if you put them any closer than that. The plants grow into each other and actually they deform the heads and they can even end up killing each other and in the process of trying to grow. So anyways a few years in Blue River has gained a few roads on its machine as a service weeding bot and has a solid market share of industrial agriculture.

The bot is used around Salinas California which is important for lots of reasons. If you recently ate celery lettuce spinach or carrots. It probably grew right here there is something like 400 specialty crops grown in the state California grows. The raw food people eat not so much the crops grown for animal feed or a lot of processing. Let's leave the Midwestern Plains out of this for now. A former mayor of Salinas based his whole economic plan on coaxing Silicon Valley down to the Salinas Valley partly because it's so hard to fill farm labor vacancies. Because of that I certainly think over the next years from now. I think we're going to be looking a lot more automation so what we view it as one these are important steps to preserve a domestic food supply local economies. But the interesting thing is these machines are more sophisticated. You're going to talk about a new workforce with higher skills higher wages. In Agriculture's case you're really talking about a new collar economy Automation is the frontier because farm kids are leaving and moving to cities meaning family-owned farms are aging. And since the world population is forecast to hit 10 billion by 2050 there will be a lot more people to feed with fewer farmers doing the work.

The Western Growers Association built a Startup accelerator for agricultural technology in Salinas. It manages in the country. It even brings in established companies to tap the US market. It's not always seen by people outside of agriculture, but there's ongoing innovation across the board and always has been. Like every other industry, there are early adopters, and there is a middle-of-the-road, and there are people who come in late. I think that I see happening, in particular, is the worldwide shortage of skilled and semi-skilled labor. Agriculture is driving growers they can't continue doing what they'd done in the past, which brings us back to the traditional hand-rearing of vegetables and fruit. It turns out solving for lettuce weeding is only fun for so long you are looking at Blue River technologies first field test of its new crop frame robot in Texas the company's AI and machine learning software can recognize weeds and cotton plants distinctly, then apply chemicals to only the weed, not the entire field. In case you didn't know, it would be a huge change in agriculture. I remember the endless revolutionary way of thinking about agriculture. It reduces the number of inputs in the case of herbicides by a factor of 10. We can do more or less the same thing with insecticides and pesticides. We can save them seed costs. We can save them the impact that we have on the environment. Right now, we are frankly overuse in chemistry. We are using about 80% of the chemicals we use don't end up in the right place.

Since the average midsize farmer 700 acres will spend about 100 to 130 thousand dollar spraying herbicides to kill weeds, fertilizer to encourage growth, and insecticides to kill bugs, only the weed would mean a farmer's cost for that chemical would be reduced by a factor of 10. Parag says right now it's like the sprayer prints weeds with a black ink cartridge. The next round he's gunning for color here's my dream. I want to see every single plant and figure out - ok you're a wheat, we will spray you with herbicide, you are a crop. You seem to be a little bit low in your nitrogen so we'll give you a little bit of nitrogen. You know what one of the your leaves is having a little bit of insect problems. I'll give you in that area of the plant i'll put some insecticides to cover you and with the optimal amount of chemicals not the maximum amount. If you use this this approach that we're talking about, what we see every time and we understand the needs of every every crop, every weed. You can spray the min amount and get the maximum output from every plant. The labs MOC field has a plastic crop to trick the software into thinking they're weeds or cotton. You think you go for was a weed not quite for this test run it thinks my gopro is cotton maybe. The robots just want to harvest more technology that's what I was telling Maury wants to protect its own laying there in the field. It doesn't want to spray water because better Lou River continues to refine software work on spray flatter and more as it also ramps up how many pictures the program has learned. It's at about 1 million photos and has about 40 contractors labeling photos of each kind of plant to bring.

The intelligence up to a goal of 10 million pictures blue river technology actually started out intending to make an autonomous lawnmower which makes sense given that farads experience was first gained working on self steering tractor technology the locks into a direction using GPS coordinates that technology has been around for years though John beer tastes and all the rest are working on the true autonomous article as well there are just a few fully autonomous farm box so far this almond and walnut Harvester by orchard machinery corporation should jostle you into the future with an autonomous harvesting shake that means business yet still a person inside the cab needs to fear at the end of each row before relaxing again only about 20 of these machines are in field so far here chick chick chick oh cool this sure Peaks. Do you think that robots will replace workers in the field one day? Oh sure of course will it be all crops all farms are no well given the scale of our farm. It would never make sense to do something like that even if something were available today but if we had 100 acres or 200-300 acres especially something that might be a mono-crop and it does make sense. I can imagine that happening.