Robot Sorts 2 Tons of Grapes in 12 Minutes Napa Valley’s Hall Winery has started using an automated grape sorter to work through its yield, separating good grapes from those that are not up to snuff at a lightning pace. “Sort grapes for five minutes and you’re dizzy. Imagine the mental drift after eight hours. I did it for years — brutal,” Steve Leveque, head winemaker at the vineyard, told Modern Farmer. Now, Leveque feeds 200 grapes into the machine every morning. The sorter digitally photographs them and then starts sorting, pushing through and shooting at 10,000 frames per second. “Most wineries can sort about two tons an hour, using 15 human sorters,” says Leveque. This robot does the same in 12 minutes. Not only that, but in blind taste tests, Leveque says the machine produces higher quality wine. Scan this QR code with your smartphone to see Hall Winery’s grape sorter in action.
Blue River Technology Raises $10M for Robotic Farming Mountain View, Calif., company Blue River Technology announced in March that it raised $10 million in funding from Data Collective Venture Capital, Innovation Endeavors and Khosla Ventures. The company is focused on commercializing robotic systems that can be used in agriculture, building on a company concept that “every plant counts.” “Blue River has taken huge strides towards reinventing food production in a world of growing populations and scarce resources,” says Jorge Heraud, cofounder and CEO of Blue River Technology. “With our new funding, we’re looking to hire passionate engineers and scientists to help us advance the boundaries of computer vision, machine learning, robotics and agriculture in order to solve real-world problems.”
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Mission Critical
HoneyComb and OSU Use UAS to Prevent Stressed Crops
HoneyComb’s UAS can pinpoint stressed crops. Photo courtesy HoneyComb Corp.
HoneyComb Corp. is developing an unmanned aerial system with Oregon State University, funded by Oregon BEST and the Portland Development Commission, which pinpoints where crops are stressed so that farmers can respond efficiently. The UAS can be used for precision agriculture and forestry applications. By determining where the stressed crops are, the system can potentially save farmers irrigation, fertilizer and labor costs so that they can respond locally and reduce input costs, decrease runoff and boost yields. For forest use, the UAS can determine tree counts, stand density and areas of pest infestation or disease, which allows growers to estimate timber value more efficiently from the air before doing labor on grounds. The $150,000 grant from Oregon BEST also supports collecting data and analysis by sending technicians into the field to gather data so that can be compared to the remote data collected by the aerial system through photography. “Rather than someone walking a 1,000acre field looking for areas of crop stress, our system can survey that acreage in an hour and analyze the data so a farmer can see where the issues are and hone in on those areas,” says Ryan Jenson, CEO and one of the three cofounders of the company. “Part of the Oregon BEST funding is allowing us to correlate and validate this data, so we have third-party verification of the efficacy of our information.” The HoneyComb system measures reflectance in the visible and near-infrared spectrum, which can be used to calculate the Normalized Difference
Vegetation Index, an indicator of crop stress. Healthy plants show up as green, whereas highly stressed plants are red. This allows growers, farm consultants or service providers to respond more efficiently to problem areas. The UAS can’t determine what’s wrong with the plants, just that they are under stress, which could be because of lack of water or fertilizer. However, the funding enables thermal imaging technology, which specifies moisture levels in plants and shows what the plant needs to eliminate stress. “We’re pleased to be partnering with the PDC to help this Oregon startup compete in an arena where Oregon’s rich history of agricultural and forestry research intersect with our strengths in high technology innovation,” says David Kenney, president and executive director of Oregon BEST. “Precision agriculture will dramatically improve the efficiency of global food production, and this partnership will help position Oregon as a leader in this emerging sector.” Michael Wing, assistant professor of Geomatics in the OSU College of Forestry and director of OSU’s Aerial Information Systems Laboratory, is overseeing the OSU side of the project. “The project is funding a graduate student who is very good at biometrics and geomatics and will provide the field verification to make HoneyComb’s product a turn-key solution,” Wing says. “Farmers won’t have to worry about analyzing the data, because they will get it all georeferenced and mapped so it’s immediately useful to them.”