Agriculture

Along with being costly, herbicides can also harm the environment … so why apply them to a whole crop, instead of just the areas where weeds are growing? That's the thinking behind the Solix Sprayer robot, which spots and sprays weeds in fields.

While greenhouses produce wastewater, microalgae-growing operations require a source of water – which is scarce in many regions. A new project aims to address both problems, by growing water-purifying algae in readily available greenhouse runoff.

Farmers could be spared a lot of work and expense – plus the environment could be spared a lot of harmful chemicals – if crops didn't have to be sprayed indiscriminately. The new plant-inspecting Solix robot was designed with those facts in mind.

Interest is growing in alternative fuel sources for heavy-duty vehicles that help sidestep heavy diesel pollution, and Amogy has broken new ground in this area by fitting its ammonia-fueled zero-emissions energy system to a John Deere tractor.

Birds regularly eat large quantities of crops, and often become accustomed to stationary devices designed to scare them away. That's why scientists are now looking at using autonomous drones to do the job.

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.

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.

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.

While manually hoeing weeds out of crops can be very time- and labor-intensive, spraying those crops with herbicides is definitely not eco-friendly. A German consortium is developing a third choice, in the form of the AMU-Bot weed-killing robot.

Scientists at Australia's Monash University claim to have made a critical breakthrough in green ammonia production that could displace the extremely dirty Haber-Bosch process, with the potential to eliminate nearly 2% of global greenhouse emissions.