New Developments
Zapping Mechanism
Automatic 2 axis positioning mechanism inspired by CNC machines and 3D printers
AutoMower
Increasing functionality of a lawn mower to autonomously navigate and trim fields for orchards
RoboWeeder
An autonomous robot to remove weeds organically without the use of herbicides with intelligent planning
Interviewing Farms in Cincinnati and San Francisco
1000+ Acres
Farmland in Cincinnati
Adam's biggest problem that we can solve is reducing expenditure on Fertilizers by identifying stand count over short intervals after seeds begin to sprout to identify which parts of his farm need highest amounts of fertilizers.
Adam's expenditure of fertilizers exceeds $100 per acre every year, an analysis and smarter fertilizer distribution can save $10,000+ per year while maintaining crop yields.
Using Existing Equipment
Gail Already owns a drone and ocasionally uses it to check on crops that are far away from their house on the field. She currently also pays expert farm consultants $10/acre every few years to get reccomendations and insights about her farm.
Gail's largest need is to make her existing drone smarter and more appropriate to aid in the farming process by providing insights about her farm.
Scale Organic Farming
Richard needs a scalable way to practice organic farming to utilize his entire aerable land of 100 acres instead of his current field of 1 acre.
Richard was an early adopter and tester of an AgTech product for automating farming: FarmBot but does not continue to use it since it was not a scalable solution.
Quickly Testing Solutions
For each of the problems we identified, we quickly started building a Minimum Viable Prototype and took it to the inital users to test the concept
Explore ProductsSolutions Explored
iSight
Smart drone software that would detect invasive species and complete stand count reports running on a custom built drone with a Raspberry Pi 4 and PixHawk controller
CropEagle
A drone attachment with a high resolution camera to detect even the smallest weeds at an affordable price point to reach the widest range of farmers
CropMantis
An autonomous robot to help small to medium size organic farms remove weeds from their fields without the use of herbicides and scale their fields
Why Weeding?
Goal: Eliminate the least gratifying task for farmers
Organic farmers identified maintaining crops (including activities such as weeding, thinning, and irrigation) as the most important task and the second most difficult task in farming.