Author: Leah Zitter

Last month we wrote about the move to smart wearable collars and VR headsets for dairy herds. Over in South Korea, livestock health care startup ULikeKorea has a different approach to delivering similar herd monitoring services. Their invention, a biofriendly non-toxic sugarcane capsule, measuring 10cm by 2.5cm is designed to be safely swallowed by a cow, thereafter residing forever inside the cow’s stomach. It provides real time data about the animal to the farmer. Globally over 70,000 cows are already being monitored this way. The capsule is an internet-of-things device, physical data from the animal is gathered on a central…

Back in 1970 Japanese agricultural manufacturer Kubota Corporation introduced the world to its first advanced tractor the ‘Dream Tractor’ (which actually looked more like a car than a tractor). It remained a concept vehicle however, never reaching production. Fast forward fifty years and at a new product exhibition in Kyoto this month, Kubota unveiled its new zero emissions concept autonomous tractor the “X tractor – cross tractor”. Thus marking the company’s 130th anniversary. With the X tractor, Kubota offers us a futuristic tractor that’s electrically-powered, with lithium-ion battery packs and solar panels. It is outfitted with tools that include GPS, on-board…

Nearly 25 percent of young hogs don’t survive to market largely due to poor heating in their pens. Their deaths cost farmers more than five hundred million dollars a year. Iowa-based FarrPro lab found its niche addressing that problem. The traditional solution is simply 125-watt light bulbs hung over the creep areas, namely where newborn piglets live. Such light-bulbs tend to be a fire hazard, are energy inefficient and give too little heat for around nine to 30 sows or more, depending on the size of these creeps. Indoor pig farms are the most vulnerable since many of these buildings are…

This autumn Kotaro Ando, a forty year-old farmer from Tara Town, Saga City (Japan) became the first customer to lease an asparagus picking robot from local agricultural high-tech startup Inaho Co. Ltd. Founded in 2017 and located in the coastal town of Kamakura, Inaho develops robots for agricultural and non-agricultural use. In January 2019, the company opened an office in Kashima (about 110 km from Tokyo) to market their autonomous robot to asparagus and cucumber farmers in Saga City and its surrounding areas. Kotaro Ando was one of these lucky asparagus farmers. Ando is extremely happy with the robot so far. “It’s…

It’s early morning in Driscoll’s berry field, Oxnard, California. In speckled sunlight, adjacent to a busy highway, a large metallic harvester with a small lime green head trundles slowly but methodically through rows of strawberries selecting the ripest and brightest of these fruits for its cargo. Not far from these fields, there’s the greenhouse, canvas awnings sheltering row upon row of blossoms, as well as ripe and unripe strawberries. This same automatic harvester glides up and down rows of ceiling-supported growing platforms, swiveling its multiple cameras and utilising its AI networks to identify ripe strawberries ready for picking. The harvester…

SAS, the Cary-based analytical software company, comes with a list of accomplishments. It claims that it cracks open the ‘black box of AI’; that it’s the No. 1 AI and advanced analytics platform; that it makes engineers 100 times more efficient; and that it cuts the diagnostic time of Volvo Trucks by 70 percent. More recently, the company focused on feeding the escalating world population, so it created a business unit to help growers and agribusiness leaders turn the ever increasing quantities of farm and agricultural data into insights for safe and secure food production. Growers are grappling with a bumper…

Think of a world with nine billion people fifty years from now. We’ll need enough high-quality fresh produce and grain to feed everybody. In turn, we’ll need three times as many greenhouse growers and farm laborers as we have today. Unfortunately, reports show fewer and fewer farmers retain their lands and greenhouses each year as conditions get harder; costs of labor, material and production get more expensive; and larger farms dominate input and output. For hired laborers, in most parts of the world they receive minimum wage and in Western countries a willing source is becoming harder to find. Indeed…

For the past four years, nine-year-old Aesha from the tiny village of Choppadandi in Telangana’s Karimnagar district would wake up and watch her father as he untied the rope from his foot that would remind him to go to the fields to turn on the pump. She’d stand by the door and watch him as he strode out to the fields and she’d beg him: “Yesterday you promised that you wouldn’t go to the field at night. I’m scared to sleep alone without you… Mom and I are worried about the snakes out there!” And he’d tell her he couldn’t…

Robotics Plus, a New Zealand-based agricultural robotics and automation company, has received US$8 million from Yamaha Motor Co. Ltd. (Japan). This was Yamaha’s second investment in the company – the first was in March, 2018 – bringing Yamaha’s total investment in the company to US$10 million. Robotic Plus, best-known for its robotic Aporo apple pickers that suction 120 apples a day, plans to use the money for agro-technologies under development that include an autonomous agricultural vehicle, robotic pollinator, robotic harvesters, and crop estimator, among other undisclosed projects. “Our core values of ‘he aronga nui’ (pioneering), ‘manaakitanga’ (collaboration), ‘tika me te pono’…

Plans to develop a modern fully autonomous farm in North Dakota, USA received a boost last week when Microsoft Corp announced an investment of $1.5 million into a technology firm called Emerging Prairie. Their ‘Grand Farm’ project aims to build a brand new modern working farm by 2025. It will serve as a best practice hub for modern agriculture – showcasing the very latest technology and its uses. There are plans for an academy at the site which will teach the farmers of tomorrow how best to use the growing surge in available agricultural data to maximise their crop yields.…