agriculture

Robot chefs can prepare everything from pancakes to sushi, and now a California startup is trying to put droids to work on farm produce as well.

Blue River Technology this week announced $3.1 million in funding for its plans to develop robots that can automatically kill weeds and thin out plants like lettuce that need adequate room to grow.

Both tasks can require large human work crews, driving up the cost of the produce.

The startup's prototype Lettuce Bot uses a camera to image the plants beneath it. Machine learning algorithms then identify which ones are desirable and … Read more

You may have heard of the Internet of things. Now researchers in the U.K. are trying to build the Internet of animals.

The University of Strathclyde has begun a $2.2 million project to equip cows with a "smart collar" that will allow their owners to keep tabs on them via cell phone.

The collar uses the same 3D sensor found in Wii video game controllers to detect shifts in the cow's head position. The data is then sent wirelessly over the cell phone network or a local network.

When a cow lowers its head, it'… Read more

At just 1/50,000 the width of an average human hair, nanoparticles are widely used in cosmetics, medicines, and more.

But their emerging use in agriculture has raised questions about health and environmental effects, and a new report by a team of chemists at the University of Texas at El Paso concludes that those questions don't yet have answers.

After reviewing nearly 100 scientific articles on the effects of a variety of nanoparticles on edible plants (including cucumbers, rye, barley, and zucchini), the team found that both uptake and build-up of nanoparticles vary widely depending on plant type … Read more

There's no whining about these dandelions; they may some day be used as a substitute for synthetic rubber in interior car products such as cupholders, floor mats, and interior trim.

Researchers at Ford and Ohio State University are growing a certain species of dandelion at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) to test it out as a source of sustainable material.

"We're always looking for new sustainable materials to use in our vehicles that have a smaller carbon footprint to produce and can be grown locally," said Angela Harris, Ford research engineer. "Synthetic … Read more

RUTLAND, Mass.--The road up to Jordan Dairy Farm here offers a typical New England view of rolling hills, wood-frame houses, and shade trees. Then up on a hill, there appears a dome-capped silo, a structure that's bringing renewable energy to agriculture.

The silo-like building is an anaerobic digester, one of five that will be installed at small dairy farms here in western Massachusetts. If they perform as hoped, they will allow these farmers to reduce their wastes and make some money in the process. They will also recycle food residue that would normally be thrown away.

The digester, … Read more

Boeing's two-year study of jatropha-curcas agriculture in Brazil has found that location choice and strong seeds are the key to maximizing the crop's benefits, the company said today.

The jatropha-curcas plant has been under close scrutiny in recent years by scientists and companies because its olives yield an oil that can be made into an alternative jet fuel. The weedy plant can grow in adverse soil conditions. And in addition to yielding oil, it provides, like most plants, the secondary benefit of removing carbon from the atmosphere. Many have been trying to compare the carbon footprint of producing … Read more

WeatherBill, a company that uses high-end computing to reduce risk in agriculture, yesterday said it raised $42 million from Khosla Ventures, Google's venture arm, and existing investors.

The San Francisco-based company, founded by two former Google employees, provides insurance plans to farmers to hedge against lost income due to extreme weather.

WeatherBill has built an application that continuously analyzes reams of weather-related data from multiple sources, including short-range forecasts, seasonal effects such as El Nino, and long-term trends. The same cloud-based platform is also used to provide insurance for travelers.

Vinod Khosla, which heads a green technology venture fund … Read more

Solyndra has found a second use for its solar collector as a shade for greenhouses.

The company on Monday said that that its solar collectors, which are an array of solar cell-covered glass tubes, are being tested at agriculture research centers in Italy and the University of California, Davis.

A conventional flat solar panel would block essentially all light, but Solyndra's collectors allow for light to pass through the glass tubes, which are coated with thin-film solar cells. That provides a diffused light conducive to greenhouse plant growth and allows growers to use their available space for power production, … Read more

Strawberry fields will forever be changed by robots that can automatically identify and pick ripe berries, according to Japanese researchers.

Developed by the minds at an organization aptly abbreviated IAM-BRAIN (that's the Institute of Agricultural Machinery's Bio-oriented Technology Research Advancement Institution), the machines can harvest more than 60 percent of a strawberry crop.

Even though each machine takes nine seconds to pick a strawberry, they can cut harvesting time from 500 hours to 300 hours for a 1,000-square-meter field (about a quarter-acre), BRAIN's Shigehiko Hayashi explains in the video below.

The robots can also pick strawberries at night. There's more video of the machine at work here, on BRAIN's Japanese page.

The berry bot has a stereo camera system that images the strawberries in 3D. Image-processing algorithms gauge their ripeness, and if a berry is at least 80 percent red, the machine neatly snips it at the stem and deposits it in a bin.

Japanese farmers are field-testing experimental versions of the robots and testing is expected to be complete by the end of the year. … Read more