Category: Modern Farmer
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IBM unveiled its new AgroPad yesterday, which uses a combination of paper, artificial intelligence and cloud computing to help farmers easily test for acidity levels and concentrations of various chemicals in their soil and water. What’s interesting about IBM’s approach is the combination of low + high tech. Here’s a description about how AgroPad works…
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The common refrain from robotics companies is that they help with manual, repetitive tasks. And when you run a farm, there are plenty of manual, repetitive tasks, and Bear Flag Robotics raised $3.5 million seed funding right before the holiday weekend to help agricultural workers out with them. Bear Flag Robotics develops autonomous driving technology…
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A combination of aging farmworkers, immigration crackdowns, and the dangerous, backbreaking work of farming have created a labor crisis in U.S. agriculture. Which means that more than ever, the industry needs tools to help find and retain reliable workers. To help uncover solutions to this labor shortage, Radicle Growth, an agtech accelerator fund, and the…
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At this point, the benefits of indoor urban farming are common knowledge: fresher food, fewer transportation emissions, and less spoilage thanks to shorter transit distances. NYC’s Gotham Greens highlighted those and other benefits this week with the announcement that it had closed a $29 million Series C equity funding round led by Silverman Group and…
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Produce is grown across somewhere between 250 and 300 million square feet of commercial greenhouse space in the U.S.. That’s a whole lot of crops that need to be monitored to make sure they are watered, properly lit and healthy. Thankfully, iUnu (pronounced “yoo-noo”) is here to help. The company makes Luna, a robot that…
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Though CropX’s soil moisture measuring sensors are prominently displayed as the main product on the company’s homepage, CropX CEO Tomer Tzach’s ambitions are much bigger. “We want to be the Nest of agriculture,” Tzach told me, referring to the smart home thermostat company that Google bought for $3.2 billion in 2014. Just as Nest thermostats…
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This week certainly kept us busy. Bear Robotics, which we were the first to cover, got a $2M investment, and Amazon opened the door to in-car grocery delivery. We also explored meat alternatives, from a tour of JUST’s cultured meat lab to Omnipork’s plant-based pork. Most excitingly of all, we had our first food tech…
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“Every other product is available online. Why can’t that be available in American agriculture?” So asks Brad McDonald, co-founder of Agroy, over the phone during a scheduled chat. The question, of course, is rhetorical, since making agricultural products available—and affordable—online is exactly what he and Agroy are doing. Agroy is an Amazon-like e-commerce platform that…
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When we talk about artificial intelligence (AI), we often speak in giant, world-shifting terms about revolutionizing a certain industry. But AI can also benefit a single person at a time. In the case of Intello Labs, its AI can be used to help prevent a poor farmer from getting screwed. Food inspection is often still…
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Apeel Sciences founder and CEO James Rogers was more concerned with paint than produce when he first came up with the idea for the company. At the time, Rogers was getting his PhD in Materials Sciences, developing a solar paint that could harvest energy. But after hearing a story on the radio about global hunger,…
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Between unpredictable weather, pests, and degrading soil quality, farming is an extremely difficult way to make a living. Indoor farming, though less weather-dependent, carries its own set of burdens. Montreal-based startup Motorleaf wants to lighten the lift for indoor farmers by improving crop yield predictions and optimizing growing conditions. The company hopes that their software,…
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Astronauts, you had better like salad. AP News reported last week that a team of scientists at Germany’s Neumayer Station III in Antarctica had successfully grown their first crop of produce without any soil, sunlight, or pesticides. The goal of the project was to explore food growing methods for use on outer space missions. In total the researchers…
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