If we talk about the agriculture sector, especially if we talk about machinery, we have to talk about John Deere, one of the most important companies in this sector. This firm does not want to be left behind in the development of new technologies and has just announced the purchase of Blue River Technology, a Californian startup that designs machine learning tools for agriculture.
This acquisition, which has had a price of 305 million dollars, confirms the interest of this company that its search for improve current farming systems. In the case of Blue River, John Deere is buying the artificial intelligence tools that will help farmers scan fields, assess crops, remove weeds ... all at the same time.
Blue River's technology, called "see and spray" is composed of a set of cameras that are attached to the crop sprayers and use machine learning to identify the plants at all times. If weeds are detected among them, it will be sprayed with pesticide, while if it is part of the crop, it will be sprayed with fertilizer. All these parameters can be configured by the farmer and thanks to this system, Blue River ensures that up to 90% of the chemical products consumed in the field can be saved in addition to reducing labor costs.
John Deere has been working on autonomous tractors before Google and Tesla began to be interested in this sector, although the evolution they have achieved is not the same that we can find in these companies, since they always a human supervision is necessary, since the sections they have to travel are full of variables and unexpected tasks that only humans can tackle, at least for now. Within agriculture some aspects can be automated, but unfortunately there is still no technology that allows us to build a farmer robot that allows farmers to rest from time to time.