Archived Content
Thumb-sized plastic beans, packed with a world of sensor circuitry, may soon be ready to monitor grain bins and storage facilities. Toss in a magic BeanIoT pod to check grain vitals. One bean to mind them all.
A secret war is waged above farmland every night. In games of hide-and-seek between bats and crop pests, the bats always win, and the victories are worth billions of dollars to U.S. agriculture.
The first four-year precision agriculture degree program in the United States is set to kick off at South Dakota State University in September 2016.
Timothy Gertson kicks up dirt off Texas’ Gulf Coast, southwest of Houston in Wharton County. He’s a young 31, but Gertson is an old-school farmer with no time for ideology and no wish to curb his options. Field decisions across his 2,000 acres at G5 Farms are dictated by dollars, and in 2016, he’s found a profit window in organic corn.
Think truffles are an agricultural sideshow? A billion dollars in demand says otherwise.
Guesswork and irrigation are long-time farming partners, but it can be a happy-in-hell marriage. When to turn on the spigot? How much water to deliver? Every farm soaks and dries in isolation because one field’s irrigation recipe is another’s death sentence.
Pirates are stealing billions during the exchange of U.S. agriculture goods, and pumping the wares right back onto American department store shelves. But CSI is ready to take on agriculture crime.
The promise of precision agriculture to find the sweet spot between hardware and agronomics, under the banner of simplicity, hasn’t arrived.
The single-row tractor is back and about to roll across a machinery graveyard. The first American-owned factory on Cuban soil in 55 years will manufacture single-row tractors.