![]() ![]() ![]() “The next step for us is to go into other crops. In his interview with Modern Farmer last summer, Heruad made it clear his company has no intention of stopping with lettuce. When it detects either a weed or a number of lettuce heads crowding each other out, the machine sprays fertilizer too potent for the target, but nourishing to the surrounding crops. ![]() Dragged behind a tractor, the machine watches rows of lettuce crops, comparing what it sees to millions of saved images. Jorge Heruad and Lee Redden, both Stanford-trained engineers, have come up with Lettuce Bot as the company’s first product. Think GPS-guided tractors and aerial imaging drones mean that the agriculture industry is already automated? Just wait until Blue River Technology gets going. Blue River Technologyīlue River’s automated vision for the future. Think of it as the Valley’s update on The Farmer’s Almanac. Come harvest time, you can even use SmartGardener to share the bounty with friends and neighbors.Īt the moment, SmartGardener has 160,000 registered users they target with advertising and e-commerce products. You can buy the seeds or plant right onsite, and throughout the growing season a steady stream of online reminders helps you manage them to a bumper crop. The online platform lets you drag and drop garden beds, then helps determine which plants will work at your location. SmartGardener might not have sophisticated sensors to showcase, but it is quickly becoming a one-stop shop for backyard gardeners. They also have the CTO of Home Depot advising the project. Jason Araburur and Luke Iseman, the partners behind the project, have conscripted Yves Behar’s Fuseproject for the same magical touch bestowed on products like the Jawbone speakers. Other companies like Easy Bloom and Flower Power have floated the idea of home soil sensors, but Soil IQ might have the most going for it. For an annual subscription fee, the company even plans to send you seeds when the time is right. Stuck among the tomatoes and peppers, it feeds gardeners live information on soil conditions and makes recommendations on when to plant and when to harvest. Their first product, already in production, is a 3-inch soil sensor topped with a solar panel that streams data via a cellular network and Wi-Fi. Soil IQ builds on that trend, bringing the long-ordained “internet of things” to the backyard garden. Many of the agriculture ideas coming out of Silicon Valley aim to make food production data more accessible, rather than investing in actual farms. Like with electronics and smart phones, a big idea can mean big money down the line. The company operated on two levels: offering advanced soil testing to farmers and a software platform built to aid in soil management decisions.īut just last week, Solum announced that The Climate Corporation (and parent company Monsanto) had bought the soil testing division of the company, leaving the software portion to spin off as Granular, Inc.Īgain, it’s a lesson for ag start-ups. “Solum” is the word geologists use to describe the earth’s layer of topsoil, so it was a natural name choice for the trio of Stanford graduates who started Solum in 2009. As Chaga Keeps Trending, Mycologists Worry About Running Out ![]()
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