Many agronomists, farmers, and VC groups monitoring the agtech world are proclaiming the startup boom is over. Investments are down, acquisitions are high, and many startups go bust. Perhaps rapid, new growth in the space is fading, but I disagree...

Seated from left: Prof. Dr. Arno Ruckelshausen, Dr. Bernd Scherer, and Dr. Reinhard Grandke. While North American growers slog through yet another season of depressed farm incomes and commodity markets, across the pond it’s looking like...

If you checked the Internet lately, you’ve probably seen the words, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain. I won’t describe them in great detail here, but Google is your friend. Currently, Bitcoin is the talk of the town gaining 1,000% in value...

Simon Blackmore: “Agricultural robots are here. They are moving from academia into the commercial sector." The market for agricultural robotics market is small but burgeoning, and their impact is likely to be quite a bit more...

Ag professionals continue to reap the rewards of new smartphone apps. And perhaps no segment of farming is benefitting more from the increased productivity — and profitability — from using mobile technology than precision agriculture. From collecting data and...

The idea of using on-farm trials to gather data about the performance of any crop input has been in place even before the advent of modern science. Farmers tend to test anything new on small portions of their fields...

Some estimates suggest over half of growers’ activities are impacted by weather conditions, from field workability to fertility management to harvest timing. No wonder more companies are entering the weather data and analysis space, either with standalone products or by teaming...

The USDA Soil Conservation Service, now Natural Resources Conservation Service, has been charged with creating the country’s soil survey. This survey was designed for broad land use planning. My career was spent mapping soils across the country and that...

Spensa Technologies announces today its partnership with TerrAvion, a California-based start-up that provides aerial imagery for agriculture. As customers of Spensa work with farmers to scout fields, they can subscribe to receive up-to-date aerial imagery of all of the fields, as...

Case IH has announced seamless data transfer capabilities between its Advanced Farming Systems (AFS) Connect farm management system and six new major service providers, including popular farm management system AgDNA. Users of AFS Connect will have the ability to share...

Right on the heels of news it has raised $110 million in a Series D funding round, Farmer's Business Network CEO Amol Deshpande spoke at the 2017 Agricultural Retailers Association (ARA) Conference and Expo, held November 28-30 in Phoenix,...

Farmers Business Network announced a $110 million Series D funding round, led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Temasek. Previous investors Acre Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, GV (formerly Google Ventures)...

Aaron Ault: “From the farmer’s perspective, data has been the future for 25 years. Without an open-source platform, the ag-data market is negligible." To Aaron Ault’s eyes, ag technology right now is something like a walled...

Monash University is establishing an ag-tech facility in Melbourne’s southeast with the vision to innovate new smart farming techniques including automated harvesting and driverless vehicles in response to the growing challenges faced by the agriculture sector, writes Priyankar Bhunia...

In the late 1990's, Oklahoma State University (OSU) developed a way to determine nitrogen (N) fertilizer requirements, writes Wilma Trujillo on Journal-Advocate.com. The new N management strategy addressed two conditions that greatly affect how much N fertilizer a crop...

Is the Internet as a “pipeline” for data a public utility, or an entity that should be open for manipulation by Internet service providers (ISPs)? That’s the essential question surrounding the concept of “net neutrality” that is once again...

The xarvio booth at Agritechnica 2017. As many of our CropLife IRON readers might know, every summer at MAGIE we award the most popular product featured at the show with the ShowStopper Award. Had we been doing...

Farmers in China have caught up with the country's booming drone trend and started using unmanned aircraft to spray pesticide onto the fields, according to an article on DailyMail.co.uk. Not only that, a team of villagers in central China recently...

Cargill’s traceable turkey pilot program is bringing consumers closer to the source of their Thanksgiving turkey using blockchain technology. The company estimates traceable turkeys will be available to more than 500,000 consumers, reports Erica Shaffer with MeatPoultry.com. Blockchain is most...

The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) has named the Praxidyn Mixmate portable ag chemical blending and recordkeeping system as a winner of a 2018 AE50 award. AE50 awards honor the year’s most innovative designs in engineering products or systems...