Tag: agriculture

Alphabet’s Mineral moonshot wants to help farmers with robotic plant buggies

In 2018, Alphabet's X lab said it was in the process of exploring how it could use artificial intelligence to improve farming. On Monday, X announced that its "computational agriculture" project is called Mineral. The Mineral team has spent the last… Source

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Amazon bans foreign sales of plants in US after mysterious seed deliveries

The US and other countries have been dealing with a wave of strange, unexpected seed shipments this summer, and Amazon has decided that the best solution is to clamp down. The Wall Street Journal has learned that Amazon has banned all sales of foreig… Source

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BeeHero smartens up hives to provide ‘pollination as a service’ with $4M seed round

Vast monoculture farms outstripped the ability of bee populations to pollinate them naturally long ago, but the techniques that have arisen to fill that gap are neither precise nor modern. Israeli startup BeeHero aims to change that by treating hives both as living things and IoT devices, tracking health and…

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Kenya’s Apollo Agriculture raises $6M Series A led by Anthemis

Apollo Agriculture believes it can attain profits by helping Kenya’s smallholder farmers maximize theirs. That’s the mission of the Nairobi based startup that raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Anthemis. Founded in 2016, Apollo Agriculture offers a mobile based product suit for farmers that includes working capital,…

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Watch a Boston Dynamics robot herd sheep in New Zealand

To prove just how useful Spot, Boston Dynamics’ four-legged robot dog, can be, the New Zealand-based robotics company Rocos shared a video of Spot herding sheep across grassy pastures. This is the kind of work Rocos hopes to do as part of a partnersh… Source

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With fresh support from its billionaire backers Pivot Bio is ushering in a farming revolution

In the first decade of the twentieth century two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, invented fertilizer — the nitrogen compound which ushered in modern agriculture and saved the world from potential starvation. Now, over a century later, a new group of scientists backed by government-owned international investment funds…

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