Blue River Technology: A Look Into The Future of Farming
There is a huge shortfall, between the amount of food we produce today, and the amount needed to sustain and nourish everyone in 2050. There will be nearly 10 Billion people on Earth by 2050, around 3 billion more mouths to feed than there were in 2010. To prevent the most catastrophic effects of global warming, and worldwide hunger, cultivators must drastically alter food production and will need to reach an impressive level of food production in the next few decades.
To cope with this evergrowing population, farmers and agriculturists have come together, to operate a multifaceted business with stunning new technology, in hopes to increase the efficiency on farms.
Blue River Technology, based in Sunnyvale, California, is the exciting new subsidiary of John Deere, an American corporation that primarily manufactures agricultural and construction machinery. According to Syngenta, since the acquisition in 2017, Blue River Technology (BRT) has more than grown exponentially, and have gained access to world-class experience in equipment manufacturing.
While preserving its startup mentality, Blue River has embarked on a mission to build a new and innovative technology that will construct and assemble the next generation of smart agricultural equipment, which will help feed the world more sustainably.
The Foundation of Blue River Technology
In 2011, Blue River Technology founders, Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden were attending Stanford University when they decided to form the start-up. At the time, Redden was pursuing graduate studies in computer vision, and machine learning applied to robotics, while Heraud was getting an executive MBA.
They both set off, on a mission to “make farming more sustainable through robotics and computer vision” and the duo’s work formed one of the many early success stories, for harnessing NVIDIA GPUs and computer vision to tackle complex industrial problems with big benefits to humanity in the agricultural field. Through the use of new and innovative machines, Blue River Technology rose to the top as one of the most impactful and valuable companies in the entirety of the agricultural industry.
With impressive accolades such as being listed among Inc. Magazine’s 25 Most Disruptive Companies, CB Insights 100 Most Promising Artificial Intelligence Companies in the World, and the Top 50 Agricultural Innovations by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, it is no surprise that Deere and Company, the folks behind the John Deere agricultural brand, bought Blue River Technology for 305 million dollars in 2017.
“We are using Machine Learning to make a Positive impact on the World. We don’t see it as just a way of making profit; it’s about solving problems that are worthy of solving”. -Jorge Heraud. Cofounder of Blue River Tech.
What Blue River is Implementing
According to the Berkely Master of Engineering, Blue River focuses on applying machine learning, robotics, and computer vision technology to agricultural equipment that will enable growers to reduce the use of herbicides by spraying only where weeds are present, optimizing the use of inputs in farming.
“Blue River is advancing precision agriculture, by moving farm management decisions, from the field level to the plant level. We are using computer vision, robotics, and machine learning to help smart machines detect, identify, and make management decisions about every single plant in the field”.
“See and Spray” Agricultural Technology
According to Science Daily, Herbicide is a pesticide used to kill unwanted plants. Selective Herbicides kill certain targets while leaving the desired crop relatively unharmed. Though, herbicides can cause detrimental effects on organisms and human health. Among the biological effects of these chemicals, it can inflict genetic damages, diverse physiological alterations, and even death of the organisms exposed.
As part of the tractor giant John Deere, Blue River remains committed to herbicide reduction. The company is engaged in multiple shares of its “See and Spray smart agricultural technology.
Pulled behind tractors, its See and Spray machine is about 40 feet wide and covers 12 rows of crops. It has 30 mounted cameras to capture photos of plants every 50 milliseconds and processes them through its on-board 25 Jetson AGX Xavier supercomputing modules.
According to Nvidia, As a tractor pulls at about 7 miles per hour, the Jetson Xavier modules running Blue River’s image recognition algorithms need to decide whether images fed from the 30 cameras are a weed or a crop plant quicker than the blink of an eye. This process allows enough time for the See and Spray’s robotic sprayer, featuring 200 precision sprayers to zap each weed individually with herbicide.
“We use Jetson to run interference on machine learning algorithms and to decide on the fly if a plant is a crop or a weed and spray only the weeds”.
Through the use of GPUs Fertilize AgTech, Blue River has trained its convolutional neural networks on more than a million images, and its See and Spray pilot machines keep feeding new data as they get used.
Using cloud GPU instances, Blue River has been able to train networks much faster. According to Joe Heraud, Blue River has been able to solve harder problems and train their neural networks in minutes, instead of hours and have been discovering cooler and newer possibilities as they continue to embark on their mission to change the agricultural world as we know it.
The Work Being Completed
It is important for all of us not to forget, the important and immense work that farmers do on an everyday basis. Not only are they producing nearly everything we eat, but the success of their farm directly impacts their future.
Farmers manage large networks of fields and millions of plants, and in order to maximize their yields, they need to reevaluate their herbicide distribution, on a plant-by-plant basis.
According to Blue River Technology, Farmers will typically employ the “one size fits all” approach, spraying their entire fields with a single uniform solution. This can result in applying unneeded herbicide, which is costly and can subject crops to an unwanted herbicide which can have devastating effects.
Though, Blue River offers an alternative approach, in which they customize where herbicides are deployed at the plant level, so that they can be used only where they are needed, reducing resistance and creating more viability for a longer period of time.
In addition, See and Spray can reduce the world’s herbicide use by roughly 2.5 billion pounds, an 80 percent reduction, which could have immense environmental benefits.
Farmers’ annual herbicide bills which are a tremendous recurring cost, can also be reduced by up to 80%, saving hundreds to thousands of dollars per year.
In a society, where the need for strengthened and advanced agriculture has proven to be a necessity, Blue River Technology has manifested to be the frontrunner of Artificial Intelligence in the agricultural field. Through the use of innovative technologies, talented and accomplished leaders, and with the help of the National Farmers Union, Blue River has risen to the top and is continuing to impact the world in an immeasurable amount of ways, all the while continuing to fulfill the dream that two dedicated entrepreneurs set out to achieve in 2011.
This is Blue River Technology. The Future of Agriculture.
