News on Drones and Agricultural Sensors from the United States

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Tillage gets a bad reputation. The truth is, no single method of tillage practice is 'bad', as long as it is done mindfully, timely, and with purpose. Look for precision agriculture solutions and the right equipment to meet your tillage goals

With the rise of precision agriculture solutions, the farming industry has become increasingly tech savvy. Many growers and producers have embraced GPS-enabled tractors, variable-rate fertilizer applications, and smart platforms.

Enabled by AT&T’s nationwide, highly secure LTE-M cellular network, the Soiltech Sensor precisely records and transmits data for soil moisture, temperature, humidity, location and impacts that may create bruising while crops are being grown, transported, and stored.

Kicking off the 12th annual Potato Expo, held Jan 14-15 in Las Vegas, the National Potato Council announced the launch of its new podcast, 'Eye on Potatoes'. The podcast in available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Scientists have developed a user-friendly online tool called Uniqprimer, which quickly and automatically designs species-specific DNA tags (also known as primers) for detecting pathogens such as Dickeya dianthicola using DNA testing.

Researchers with the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture will lead a new DARPA program of $7.5 million to use potato plants as a new, revolutionary sensor platform to detect environmental threats to deployed troops and civilians.

The problem for North Carolina’s sweet potato farmers is knowing whether the drenching rains unleashed by hurricane Florence will have the same effect as being inundated by a flooded pond or creek. Some sweet potato fields received as much as 30 inches.

Dirk Hays,Texas A&M AgriLife Research plant geneticist: “With Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), we can image the size of the tubers and get a correlation to the actual physical size of the potato without harvesting them. Potatoes are a dream for Ground Penetrating Radar.”

Idaho State University researchers have found high-tech cameras mounted on drones flying 60 meters above potato fields can effectively detect individual diseased and stressed plants.

Agricultural researchers of the Oregon State University will begin testing two small, remote-controlled aircraft this month, flying them over potato fields in the Hermiston area in trials that may help farmers use water, fertilizer and pesticides more ...