- You'll never guess what's happening
under this hood:
a robot is self-targeting weeds, and killing them.
- These things have never been done before anywhere,
in any field, ag is a fantastic place to do it
because the value of the work is very real.
- Our planet's population is growing at a rate
where we'll see 10 billion people by 2050,
and everyone needs to eat.
Scientists, engineers, and growers
are racing to find efficient ways to grow more food
without compromising the Earth.
The capabilities this robot holds
is something that agriculture has never seen before.
We're going to meet the founders behind it,
and find out what it takes to develop
a potentially industry-changing technology
that can help better feed the world.
We're in the Cuyama Valley of central California,
where you won't find much of anything except farming.
What comes to mind when you think about farming?
Tractors?
Corn?
What about robots?
Autonomous robots are changing the way we farm
and are going to be essential
in feeding our growing population.
But while most of them help move objects from A to B,
the real value is in the robots
that make strategic growing decisions
that result in bigger, healthier food.
- So what's behind me right now is Verdant Robotics'
organic weeding machine, we also do fertilization
with this machine.
It uses computer vision and machine learning
to see objects of interest and then act
on those objects of interest,
so it's a intelligent sharp-shooter.
- We'll get into how all of this works
in a moment, but first, let's talk about what it's doing.
These robots identify each plant they hover over.
They decide whether to fertilize or kill it.
And then, using sub-centimeter precision,
it shoots it with the necessary product.
This allows it to use 95% less chemicals
than traditional spraying techniques.
- One thing to understand about our robot
and how it interacts with plants is that,
it'll actually remember every single plant.
- As the robot rolls over a field,
high-res cameras scan every single plant
and create a digital copy of the whole farm.
This allows the robot to geolocate each plant.
- We're really farming
at the centimeter-level basis here,
so this is allowing us to farm every plant individually.
- Every single plant?
How many plants are in here?
- Probably 4 million.
- Growers have been able to extract data
from their fields for decades,
but never at this level.
However, most growers already have way more data
than they can possibly comprehend.
What they really want is a tool that can crunch
all that data, find insights,
and then autonomously do the job-
that sounds like a project for an engineer.
- Welcome to Verdant Headquarters.
Here you have mostly software engineers,
but over here we've got a bunch of mechanical engineers,
they are designing what we actually deploy,
the physical parts.
- This is Gabe Sibley,
and he's the engineering brain behind these robots.
- The problem that we're optimizing for is,
how to grow more profitable, healthy produce.
And so, really what we do is we take cameras,
we're essentially filming as we're rolling by-
in very high resolutions, very high frequencies-
really to bring to light the types of phenomenon
that agronomists would need to see in the field
in order to make decisions.
Really what we're doing is building a CAD model of the farm,
you know, like a video game.
That transforms the problem into one
that's amenable to computation.
- Now, this is the key:
the robot can know every square centimeter of a farm.
It then uses that knowledge
to autonomously farm the crops
in ways not humanly possible.
- One thing that we do in apples, for instance,
is when a king blossom opens, we can hit that with pollen.
And then a few days later, when the lateral blossoms open,
we can apply other things that actually prevent pollination.
That allows us to do thinning so much more precisely,
and thereby grow larger apples.
This is how you grow greater yields, larger produce,
more nutritious food-
this is how you really unlock superhuman farming.
- It's one thing for ag startups
to develop new capabilities in the lab:
it's a whole other challenge to make it work in the field.
Growers like Bolthouse Farms,
who grow a majority of the United States' carrots,
are experimenting with startups to search for better,
more sustainable ways of growing their crops.
- The main thing that we've done is worked to actually build
an ecosystem where startups can come to trial
and test their technology.
We're not afraid to bring new tech onto our acres.
- When you work on a farm, it's challenging.
You're rolling through a field,
rough, three-dimensional terrain,
crazy temperatures, dust, vibration,
and you've got to detect and track a target
that's a few millimeters, and then put a droplet of liquid
on that as you roll by-
and then you need
to do that 20 times per second
with 50 sprayers simultaneously.
So how do you build something that's robust,
that can stand up to those situations,
that, at the same time,
does something incredibly complicated?
- So the orientation, Curtis, is gonna be,
so it's like this, it's gonna be like this.
- Yeah, exactly.
- My job is to sort of assess the technology
at a foundational level, and see is there
actually an opportunity for this to have
a big impact once it's ready.
- There's this stereotype of the farmer,
you know, the straw that's in his teeth, you know,
resistant to change-
our experience has been anything but.
The growers we work with, they understand
where the future is, and they're pulling us by the nose.
They're the ones that wanna see this change,
and they're just begging us to get it done faster.
- Why we think robotics is important is something
that the president of ag actually turned me onto,
and it's about changing the script
of farming from yield per acre to nutrition per acre.
Can we make that crop be healthier for humans
through precision agriculture?
- Farmers have always been looking
for more efficient ways to growing food,
especially when the food system
is experiencing immense pressure like ours is today.
Agriculture is entering into its fourth revolution,
one marked by computer vision, AI, and robots.
With each revolution, we've seen great progress,
but not without trade-offs.
The last major change in agriculture was known
as the 'Green Revolution,' it gave a crucial boost
in crop productivity when much of the developing world
was on the brink of famine.
It introduced high-yield crop breeds
that required large amounts of chemical fertilizers
and pesticides.
Today, these methods still help feed the world
but at the cost of many environmental imbalances.
But the good news is this fourth agricultural revolution
actually has the potential to restore some of that balance.
- Increasingly, folks are turning towards, you know,
cover-cropping again, and inter-cropping
and other regenerative agriculture techniques
that allow us to keep the soil healthy.
- Techniques like inter-cropping
place multiple different crops in a single field,
which creates a healthier ecosystem
and balance between resources.
- The challenges there have been that it's difficult to do
that at the same sort of scale that we can do mono-cropping,
which is how we feed the world.
- But because Verdant's robot has the ability
to farm each plant individually,
it could potentially enable these types
of regenerative ag techniques at commercial scales.
- Which, ironically, is kind of returning
to how we farmed, you know, a hundred years ago-
unlocking knowledge that a lot of older growers had,
and bringing it back through technology.
- I deeply feel the responsibility to make the world
a better place and to be aware of the ecological impacts,
the societal impacts of our robots,
kind of everything full stop.
I think we're just at the very beginning.
We haven't even begun to see the effects
of this digital revolution in agriculture.