Showing posts with label Maize. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maize. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Robotic Farming

This robot blends in. It looks like a small tractor.



A Nimble-Wheeled Farm Robot Goes to Work in Minnesota
Corn is planted on 100 million acres in the United States, and nitrogen fertilizer runoff is a major pollution problem. .... GPS-guided tractors routinely apply seed and fertilizer across large areas, and new airborne drones are providing farmers with high-resolution sensing ability ..... the ability to apply fertilizer at precise times and locations is “very critical.” ..... The next step is to deploy multiple Rowbots on industrial-scale farms, and to add more sensing capacity to the machines. The company is also testing using them for planting seed on cornfields for fall crops, called cover crops, while the mature corn is still standing.
Agricultural Drones
the vanguard of farmers who are using what was once military aviation technology to grow better grapes using pictures from the air, part of a broader trend of using sensors and robotics to bring big data to precision agriculture.