top | item 32036090

(no title)

toufka | 3 years ago

Deere bought the startup Blue River for $300M. Drones to identify and specifically spray just them. Not quite mechanical removal, but closer than spraying the whole field:

https://medium.com/@dcvc/john-deere-acquires-blue-river-tech...

discuss

order

jelliclesfarm|3 years ago

Blue River doesn’t use drones.

There were so many layers to that medium post. It’s like an incestuous orgy in a glyphosate teacup.

First..There once was a company called Climate corp..that sold a neat little box called Fieldview that was slapped under a tractor. When the farmer harvested corn, Fieldview harvested data. All kinds of data. Useless data that the farmer didn’t need and know that he had. Climate was amassing crap ton of data from thousands of acres of American fields.

This caught the eye of John Deere. They wanted Climate. But what Climate had was nothing short of a treasure chest. Monsanto wanted that too. At the end, Monsanto got the prize. They purchased Climate.

Climate under Monsanto went on to create Precision Planting and they were going to sell that arm to John Deere. But due to anti trust concerns, the courts put several road blocks. As if Monsanto and John Deere already don’t control American Ag..

So finally Bayer purchased Monsanto but not all parts of it. Climate was spun off and Monsanto’s investment arm Monsanto Growth Ventures was shut down and the portfolio went on to populate DCVC.

Blue River Tech was a small company that came up with a ‘See and Spray’ tech to identify weeds in the lettuce fields of California with AI and sprayed it with an organic fertilizer high N concentration that burnt emerging thread stage weeds. DCVC was investor in Blue River.

John Deere bought out Blue River because they gave up on buying Climate from Monsanto for $305 million. Blue River tech that was using its See and Spray AI in organic lettuce fields now uses the tech for GM cotton etc and is part of JD’s Agtech offerings as AI full stack.

And yes, they use glyphosate. I will tell the fairytale of how Monsanto used to sell seeds, fertilizer, herbicides. Sterile GMO seeds that can only grow with Monsanto inputs and need their magic sauce with glyphosate.

But for now..Blue River doesn’t use drones.