News on Drones and Agricultural Sensors from the Americas

Friehe Farms in Washington’s Upper Columbia River Basin combines teamwork and advanced technology to produce high-quality russet potatoes. Drones, GPS-guided planting, and climate-controlled storage enhance efficiency, while traditional four-year crop rotation helps maintain soil health.

The McKenna Institute at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) announced a CAD 3.75 million (USD 2.7 million) investment from a partnership led by potato processor McCain Foods that will revolutionize digital agriculture, progress regenerative farming practices and minimize the impact of climate change on farmland.

A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a new fuel cell that harvests energy from microbes living in dirt.

Machine-Learning driven crop insights tool, HarvestEye is set to showcase its refreshed 2.0 system at North America’s largest potato industry trade show Potato Expo.

McCain Foods has announced the launch of Presia Ag Insights ("Presia").

PhD student Rob Sears engineered the potato plant, also known as a phytosensor, to indicate high radiation levels through changing leaf fluorescence.

Un equipo Colombiano liderado por William Alfonso León Rueda, logró desarrollar un algoritmo capaz de identificar una enfermedad causada por el hongo Verticillium.

Trimble announced a definitive agreement to form a joint venture with AGCO to better serve farmers with factory fit and aftermarket applications in the mixed fleet precision agriculture market.

Carrot Ventures is announced the launch of Cellar Insights. It is the second company emerging from Carrot's AgTech company formation model.

In a critical move towards advancing precision agriculture, AgTech startup Picketa Systems has successfully closed a CAD 1.445M (USD 1.059M) (Seed investment round. The funding will broaden the development and deployment of their real-time plant tissue analysis technology, called LENS™.

Agriculture technology (Agtech) has an adoption challenge. There are multiple barriers to introduction and scaling from an industry perspective. An analysis by McKinsey.

Ag start-up Picketa Systems announces the release of their Leaf Evaluated-Nutrient System, LENS™. The LENS™ fertilizer management tool offers real time insight in 13 nutrients in potato plants.

Soiltech Wireless, a leader in remote crop monitoring and traceability from farm to transport and storage, has completed its seed funding round of USD 2.5 million. Homegrown Capital was the leader in this round along with Great North Ventures

McCain Foods Limited has acquired the predictive crop intelligence portfolio from Resson, an analytics technology firm enhancing farming efficiency. Resson's vision-intelligence-based technologies leverage field.

Ceres Imaging, the precision farming analytics provider that helps farmers build more profitable and more sustainable operations, announced a new partnership with Probe Schedule

Time is paramount when testing potato crops before spraying and fertilizer applications, which is what Picketa’s new product is all about. For their final engineering project, four University of New Brunswick students decided to help potato growers.

New Brunswick agricultural technology company, Picketa Systems, closed their CAD 300,000 pre-seed investment round to deploy their innovative plant nutrient analysis and decision support system to the Atlantic Canadian potato industry.

A new potato or sweet potato variety represents only the "tip of the iceberg," concealing hundreds, if not thousands, of hours invested in testing and developing that variety.