How Autonomous Technology Helps Growers

Igino Cafiero
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

Growing crops is tough. In order to be successful, the modern grower must be an agronomist, biologist, meteorologist, chemist, manager, mechanic and more. Even with expertise in all of these categories, some factors still remain largely out of a grower’s control. Weather, crop prices and the cost of labor all affect a grower’s bottom line. The challenges are seemingly endless.

Given the complexity of these problems, Bear Flag Robotics is teaming up with California growers who are facing increasing operational costs year over year. As we work with these professionals, we continue to learn more about their operations and the intricacies of their work. Additionally, the personal bonds we’ve formed through working with these growers have increased our resolve to build the solutions they need most.

At Bear Flag, we’re developing autonomous driving technology for farm tractors. Currently, we do this by equipping tractors and implements with technology that allows growers to automate many of their most common tasks. This addresses the farm labor shortage while also providing growers analytics and insight to their crops and operations. But that’s just the beginning.

In the future, Bear Flag machinery will operate in completely revolutionary ways from the traditional man-and-machine combination of today. Crops will be planted in more efficient configurations than rows, which are currently optimized for traditional tractor use. Furthermore, Bear Flag machinery will enable multiple crops to be intermingled in the same field, increasing yield and sustainability — something that is completely unrealistic with today’s cultivation and harvest machinery.

Growers in Northern California are faced with an extreme labor shortage as well as an increasing cost for available labor. In turn this drives the cost of growing already expensive organic crops even higher.

Bear Flag is working to solve these problems by attacking the labor problem head on. Once the cost of labor is removed, growers are considering entirely new possibilities. We can automate tasks such as UV treatments or physical pest control that involve many hours of a machine operator’s time. Not only does this drive down the cost of high quality food, but it also promotes land stewardship and sustainability.

Today, we are proud to announce that we’ve secured our seed funding round, led by True Ventures, which will help us extend our mission and continue to build a secure future for growers (and eaters)!

As we continue on this exciting journey, we’d love to be in touch. If you are a grower or interested in joining our team, email us at contact@bearflagrobotics.com. We’d love to hear from you, and look forward to sharing our progress!

Igino Cafiero
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