Robots Are Coming for Your Crop Protection (and Other Inputs …)

The market for agricultural robotics market is small but burgeoning, and their impact is likely to be quite a bit more widespread than the robotic hands of orchard, grove, vineyard, field, and packinghouse so common in the popular imagination, writes James Sulecki on PrecisionAg.com, a sister website to AgriBusinessGlobal.com.

That was the reigning sentiment at the second annual International Forum of Agricultural Robotics (FIRA) in Toulouse, France, where nearly 500 attendees more than doubled that of 2016’s inaugural event. FIRA is organized by a number of robotics-focused organizations with support from media partners including Meister Media Worldwide, parent company of PrecisionAg and AgriBusiness Global.

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There are several distinct classes of robotics — including vision systems, field robotics, and stationery robots, said Dan Harburg of the Dutch ag-tech venture capital firm Anterra Capital. Technologies which are “more about materials handling or augmenting human labor, as opposed to fully replacing human labor, are a little bit closer to market and are therefore closer to invest-ability,” Harburg said.

Indeed, “agricultural robots are here,” asserted Simon Blackmore, Head of Agricultural Robotics and Director of the National Centre for Precision Farming (NCPF) at Harper Adams University in the U.K. “They are moving from academia into the commercial sector. I’m aware at the moment of 12 agricultural robot startup companies. I think that now is the time when we need to think about things in different ways and be able to let farmers take advantage of all the opportunities that we’ve been able to create.”

Read more at PrecisionAg.com.

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