Agriculture

A new Texan startup has announced its first electric motorcycle. The awkwardly named Volcon Grunt is a fat-wheeled off-roader with a 100-mile range, and it'll soon be followed by a pair of side-by-side four-wheelers built for practicality and fun.

Although there are now a few different crop-spraying multicopter drones, fixed-wing drones are faster and have a longer battery range. That's where the recently US-certified autonomous electric Pelican crop duster comes into the picture.

Alphabet’s X moonshot factory is a research group working to solve big-picture ideas through technological innovation, and for its latest venture the team is turning its attention to sustainable farming.

Just like us, crop plants are subject to bacterial infections. And while antibiotics are often used to kill those microbes, compounds extracted from fly larva fat may prove to be a more eco-friendly alternative.

In order to keep water from evaporating from the soil, farmers often cover the ground around their crop plants with sheets of polyethylene plastic. There could soon be a more eco-friendly alternative, though, in the form of soybean oil-coated sand.

In a breakthrough that promises to revolutionize the precision breeding of animals, scientists have used the CRISPR gene editing tool to produce infertile animals that become "surrogate sires" and produce sperm containing only donor animal DNA

As the population increasingly moves towards tech jobs, there's now a shortage of coconut harvesters in India. That's why scientists there have built a tree-climbing coconut-harvesting robot, that could perhaps someday take up the slack.

If you were a farmer, wouldn't you prefer to just recharge your utility tractor, instead of refuelling it from your limited onsite supply of diesel? That's exactly where the eUtility Electric Tractor is designed to come in.

While crop-spraying drones do have advantages over full-size piloted aircraft, they're limited by their battery range. Dutch startup Drone4Agro is developing a solution to that problem, though, in the form of a range-extended electric multicopter.

It's a quandary – leafcutter ants cause a great deal of damage to crops, but applying pesticides to those crops harms the environment. Scientists have developed a possible solution, in the form of a high-tech material that uses an odor to trap ants.

We've already heard about drones that spray crops with herbicides and fertilizers. The AeroSeeder is a bit different, however, in that (as you might have guessed) it disperses seeds that might otherwise be difficult to plant.

A team led by researchers at the University of Tokyo has shown that feeding pigs on the barley waste left over from the distillation of the Japanese liquor shochu makes for more relaxed pigs and results in tastier pork.