Agriculture

Farmers and ranchers have a lot of land to cover, and a lot of work to get done in a day. The Ryse Recon was designed with those facts in mind, as it's being made to quickly fly rural users from place to place.

Instead of using insecticides, farmers will sometimes cover their plants with a mesh fabric. A new such material has now been developed, which keeps out a wider range of bugs while still allowing crops to get enough sunlight and water.

Farmers will often place sheets of plastic on the ground along their crop rows, in order to help hold moisture in the soil. According to a new study, however, the use of wax-coated sand may be a cheaper and greener way to go.

Imagining a future where hundreds of sensors are placed around forests or farms for large-scale monitoring of the environment, scientists have developed platforms light enough to disperse like dandelion seeds in the breeze when dropped from a drone.

In East Africa and other regions, potato crops are currently threatened by a worm known as the potato cyst nematode. There could be new hope for protecting the plants, however, in the form of biodegradable paper made from banana waste.

Although genetically modified crops have some advantages over their regular counterparts, creating the modified plants can be quite challenging. Scientists have now developed a simpler approach, in which normal plants are altered with a crop spray.

Ammonia is commonly used in commercial crop fertilizers, which in turn can pollute waterways when they run off of fields. New research, however, suggests that engineered bacteria could one day take the place of such fertilizers.

According to Israeli startup Tevel Aerobotics, there is a severe shortage of workers available to pick fruit at orchards. That's why the company is developing an alternative, in the form of autonomous flying drones that do the job.

John Deere's fully autonomous 8R tractor uses six stereo cameras and machine learning for all-around obstacle detection and to plot its position to within an inch of where it's supposed to be in the field.

Not only are herbicides harmful to the environment, but they're also one more expense for the farmers who use them. That's where the Greeneye selective spraying system comes in, as it's claimed to only dispense herbicide when weeds are detected.

A study is outlining strategies that should be employed by cannabis growers to mitigate the plant’s ability to absorb heavy metals from soil. The study indicates it is possible cannabis contaminated with heavy metals could lead to chronic diseases.

New Holland Agriculture has teamed with Pininfarina to present a concept that's sexier than a tractor should be. The Straddle Tractor Concept navigates steep, narrow vineyards to help get aromatic reds and whites to dinner tables the world over.