Difference is you can't "hold in" a pre-term birth b/c you're afraid of covid.
2,890 karma · joined April 3, 2007
Lots of things could fix this, less beam divergence, custom signals processing on multiple returns. But out of the box, it’s this statement does not hold true.
Now owned by John Deere. Goal is 10x reduction in chemicals while doubling yields. We’re deep in ml & robotics and our creations scale across the deere fleet touching most of the arable land in the world.
My latest has substantially improved the company. We're still very independent, employees made great money and now we have a strategic rudder and a patient investor that we didn't have before. In this case, our tech is very critical to their long term strategy.
For the last 100 years John Deere has been giving farming equipment power in the form of diesel engines. The next 100 years will be about giving machines eyes. If machines have eyes, they can do better work. If they can do better work people get higher yields.
Email me at: willy dot p at bluerivert dot com
In the valley you leave the trench and come back to find that all your friends are rich.
No words can alleviate that regret. But if you’re having near misses like this you’re actually really close to something good.
Come make smart things in big machines: http://careers.bluerivertechnology.com
Many stories. Will blog soon :)
Agricultural Robotics. Hiring all types of SW Engineers at all levels especially those with the willingness and aptitude to delve into machine learning. We made a machine that reduces herbicide usage by 95% and dramatically lessens the necessity for GMO's.
Write SW for machines that are 50 feet wide and learn to drive a huge tractor while you're doing it. You'll save farmers a lot of money and keep the rivers blue while you're doing it.
These listings are suggestive but Python and / or C++ preferred: http://careers.bluerivertechnology.com
Cheers, Willy
At first I thought this was an onion article. It turns out they're serious.
The way the Valley generally thinks of ag is completely broken and I highly recommend avoiding Valley people if you want to learn about it. "Fully automated" is a thing people who've never farmed before assume is possible and assume people who farm want.
There is a lot of value on the table in ag tech. Depending on what your objectives are, I recommend having as many face to face / dirty boots meetings w/ growers as you can. Understand the realities and nuance of their day to day and find a place where you can make their lives better. Ignore the sensational articles. Most "ag-tech" companies are comically detached from the realities of their intended customers.
If your goal is to grow things then follow the above advice w/ 10x the emphasis. Happy to help further. Contact in profile.
We are building machines that will reduce chemical usage in agriculture by an order of magnitude. Join us.
There are other issues w/ exploding seed head making the problem worse and w/ making reliable complex moving parts in the horrible ag environment.
Happy to chat. Contact in profile.
The Dicamba story is quite interesting. Monsanto is selling Dicamba resistant seeds even though the chemical is not approved for use on those crops. As Dicamba is approved for other uses, growers can buy the Dicamba ready seeds and illegally apply it. Dicamba is finicky. In many weather conditions it volatilizes and drifts to a neighboring farm. If the neighbor doesn't have Dicamba ready seeds, he could lose his crop and have very little legal recourse. Today two growers got in a dispute about Dicamba drift and one shot and killed the other. The drift problem is forcing growers that don't use Dicamba to buy Dicamba resistant seeds as a defense mechanism. It's pretty nuts. I feel like the herbicide resistant weed problem is like a "Global Warming that nobody knows about."
More interesting is the fact that it takes decades to produce a gene / chemical pairing and get it approved for use. The weeds evolve faster than the GMO / chemical companies' ability to deliver new products.
The startup I work for, Blue River Technology, is going after this problem. We make machines that detect the crop, detect the weeds and apply non-selective chemicals to just the weeds. Because we target selectively we can use non-systemic, contact herbicides will kill resistant weeds no matter what. The grower saves on chemicals, put orders of magnitude less poison in the ground and gets better weed control.
The problems w/ this article are numerous. The guy clearly spent more time looking at UN stats than he did walking the fields and talking w/ growers. Somehow he missed the rather obvious fact that GMO + roundup is more cost effective regardless of yield. Regardless, he brought up some interesting points and I'd rather be talking about it than not.
-- Disclaimer -- The company I work for is partially funded by both Monsanto and Syngenta. Not that anything I said is defending the status quo :)
Fuji took a UX worked for decades on film cameras and applied it to digital cameras. The result is that I'm having a lot more fun taking pictures.
Edit-- just got an XT2 w the 90mm F2.