Blue River CEO explains how tech can make farming more sustainable and efficient
Blue River Technology (a subsidiary of John Deere) VP, Autonomy & New Ventures Willy Pell speaks with tech editor Dan Howley about farming tech, sustainable agriculture, and how John Deere is looking to improve farming efficiency at the CES 2023 conference.
Video Transcript
RACHELLE AKUFFO: Well, it was a big week for tech, and Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley got a front row seat at CES in Las Vegas. Now he had a chance to speak with Willy Pell, Blue River Technology VP of autonomy and new ventures, hitting on the latest innovations, delivering products that enable farmers to work efficiently, sustainably, and profitably. Take a listen.
WILLY PELL: The big machine you see here is called See & Spray, right? So what this is an agricultural sprayer that is equipped with cameras and computers. And what you can do is you drive this machine over your crop, and it can detect the crop and detect the weeds with the cameras, and in real-time, compute what's what and spray only the weeds.
DAN HOWLEY: So it's only hitting what it should, what it needs to, and not what it shouldn't.
WILLY PELL: Correct.
DAN HOWLEY: OK.
WILLY PELL: So the traditional way that you would control weeds in farming is you get a genetically modified seed. And then you spray the entire field, right? And so we're saving farmers lots and lots of money, like 70% of their herbicide bill, by only spraying the weeds. And it's just much better for the environment, so.
DAN HOWLEY: I know that you have this-- we can't obviously see it right now, but it's the Exact Shot. What does that do exactly?
WILLY PELL: OK, so that's a planting technology. And so what that's doing is as the seed goes in the ground, it gives it this tiny little shot of espresso of fertilizer. Very small amount, but very powerful. So usually the way people apply fertilizer in planting is they'll just spray everything, right? You fertilize all the ground in between the seeds--
DAN HOWLEY: Hit it all.
WILLY PELL: --which isn't actually valuable, right? All that nitrogen ends up running off into the rivers. And so we love these areas where we could save farmers money and make farming easier and more sustainable as a business, but also environmentally as well.
DAN HOWLEY: So, yeah.
WILLY PELL: And so both of those things fit that really well.
DAN HOWLEY: I guess, how much more efficient can kind of a farmer be, right? I mean--
WILLY PELL: Oh, my gosh.
DAN HOWLEY: --you have these huge areas that you're covering.
WILLY PELL: So we think it's a big question. And I can have a pretty swaggy answer. What-- the place to start is called record breaking corn growers. And so what they can do is, with non-economically scalable methods, grow 600 bushels in a single acre. Now, scalable methods will grow about 200 bushels an acre, right? So we think that there's a 2 to 3x-- there's about at least 2x headroom on growing more food with the same amount of land.
DAN HOWLEY: Through this type of technology?
WILLY PELL: Exactly this type of technology because, basically, the sensitivity, what that farmer does when he grows that big single acre, is they walk the fields, and they look at every single plant. And they treat every single plant as an individual, right? And they're looking at it and saying this plant needs nitrogen. This plant doesn't. This plant needs-- you know, this plant has a bug infestation.
So what we want to do is literally scale what that guy's doing, what that farmer is doing as he's walking the field, and just do that with the equipment, right? Because you could never walk 1,000 acres like that. But this machine could. And these cameras could, and they can slowly start to pick apart all of these kind of inefficiencies and eventually treat every plant like an individual plant, rather than a monolithic species.
DAN HOWLEY: I guess as far as the way this can help new farmers getting more women into farming, gender non-conforming individuals into farming, how does this-- does this help? And I guess, when can we expect to see autonomy really take over the entire industry?
WILLY PELL: I think that maybe this is-- it's a good question. I haven't thought about it, but I think as a big picture, it just makes farming easier. So if you think about anybody who doesn't want to sit in a machine for 12 hours a day, right, you may love everything about farming, but when you're sitting in it 12 hours a day, day in, day out, you might not like that. And whoever you are, they're probably going to appreciate that, right?
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah.
WILLY PELL: And so what autonomy does is it basically gives people their time back. The real intellectual work of farming is around understanding the weather, understanding what crops are going to work in what region, when should you plant. There are a lot of these sort of big, how do you market your crop? How do you sell it? When do you sell it? How much do you sell? Like, these are like the real business decisions.
And then there's just vast amounts of, like, fairly crank turning work that they have to do that involves, like, dozens and dozens of hours in these machines. And so we think that by reducing the need for that someone who's intellectually very interested in farming, you might actually attract a new type of farmer.
And whoever that may be, we don't know. But the goal is, let's make it as easy as possible. And let's have people do the things that are really uniquely qualified-- that they're uniquely good at because we can't tell a farmer when to sell the crop. We can drive back and forth in the field and do the job for them.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: Great start from Dan Howley there.
