John Deere’s $305 million purchase of Blue River Technology, “a startup that makes robots capable of identifying unwanted plants, and shooting them with deadly, high-precision squirts of herbicide,” is yet another indication of the “growing appetite for high tech in agriculture,” says Wired.
Blue River’s computer-vision technology will complement Deere’s GPS-guided farm equipment, helping it “view and understand the crops it is working with,” says Wired. “Pesticides and other chemicals are traditionally applied blindly across a whole field or crop,” but “the startup’s robots are towed behind a regular tractor like conventional spraying equipment. But they have cameras on board that use machine-learning software to distinguish between crops and weeds, and automated sprayers to target unwanted plants.”
Blue River says its first product, LettuceBot, is used in roughly 10 percent of U.S. lettuce production, and the company plans to roll out a system for cotton farmers next year.