Farming

With large high-tech sustainable farming facilities located in California and Texas, Silicon Valley-based startup Iron Ox relies heavily on robots to help shoulder the workload. The company's latest bot, named Grover, can lift over 1,000 lb (454 kg).

The Plantee indoor greenhouse was developed for folks who have brought a colorful plant home from a shopping trip, only to watch it wither and die. The all-in-one, plug-and-play solution takes the guesswork out of caring for plants in the home.

According to Pennsylvania State University's Asst. Prof. Long He, the mushroom-farming industry is currently experiencing a labor shortage. His team has thus set about addressing that problem, by developing a mushroom-picking robot.

One of the challenges of farming lies in the fact that by the time plants appear to be stressed, it may already be too late to address the problem. A new potato, however, is designed to warn farmers by fluorescing at the earliest stages of stress.

The company behind the Smart Herb Garden we reviewed back in 2014 has launched a new indoor garden on Kickstarter. The Click & Grow 25 system promises to grow "substantial amounts of greens for everyday use, without becoming a time-consuming hobby."

Australian researchers have cooked up a creative partial solution to the problem of labor shortages in the fruit-picking sector, developing a robot that can harvest apples from orchards at high speed.

Startup Carbon Robotics has wheeled out an autonomous machine for farmers that has weeds in its cross hairs, using a combination of computer vision and high-powered lasers to comb fields and take out thousands of the pesky plants an hour.

When it comes to targets for autonomous machinery, those carrying out repetitive tasks on farmland are ripe for the picking. The newly introduced Monarch Tractor is designed to show how it’s done, packing an all-electric powertrain and machine learning.

Generally speaking, you don't see many crops being grown in arid regions – especially when irrigation isn't practical and/or affordable. That could be about to change, though, with the development of what's being described as "self-watering soil."

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.

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.

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