Engineers have developed a vegetable-picking robot that can autonomously harvest iceberg lettuce, a manually demanding crop for human pickers. Vegebot was trained using a machine-learning algorithm that helped it distinguish healthy lettuces ready for harvest, in a variety of weather conditions.
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Livestock like sheep and cows are responsible for huge amounts of methane emissions. Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed the gut microbes of different sheep and found clues that may help us curb the problem.
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When a cotton gin is used to separate cotton fibers from their seeds, a lot of lint is produced as a waste product. Currently, much of that cotton lint is just burned or put in landfills. Thanks to recent research out of Australia, however, it may soon be converted into biodegradable plastic.
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We've all had that surreal experience of looking down out of the window from a plane and suddenly seeing familiar environments from completely new and strange perspectives. This gallery features the work of several photographers who find incredible abstract patterns in large-scale agriculture.
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When farmers find sickly plants in their crops, it's important that they find out which malady is responsible, as quickly as possible. New microneedle technology could help, paving the way for a handheld device that would provide the answer within minutes, right in the field.
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It’s no secret that tomatoes plucked from the supermarket aisles just aren’t that tasty. To find taste genes that could be spliced back into commercial crops, researchers have complied a pan-genome of all cultivated and related wild tomato species, uncovering almost 5,000 previously-unknown genes.
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Back in 2016, we wrote about the Agerris SwagBot farming robot and its abilities in crop inspection, weed removal and yield counting. Now, having raised US$4.6 million for commercialization, the company is looking to get an AI version of the robot onto the market within a year.
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According to Latvian entrepreneur Elviss Straupenieks, it costs about US$65,000 a year to pesticide-spray an average-size vineyard using a helicopter. His alternative? Well, he claims that his company's AirBoard Agro drone can do it for half as much – plus it offers a few other advantages.
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A new study of satellite data has shown that the Earth has gotten “greener” in the last 20 years or so, with the biggest contributors being China and India. Before we celebrate though, there are a few caveats to consider.
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Sulfur is often chemically "scrubbed" from the flue-gas emissions of coal-burning power plants. Gypsum (aka calcium sulfate) is produced as a byproduct of the process, and typically ends up in landfills. According to new research, however, it could be used to boost crops in a number of ways.
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