The food 3D-printing industry is expected to grow at 50% annually. Today’s breakthroughs will soon allow us to boost food production by nearly 70%, using a fraction of the real estate and resources. 3D-printed meals will be customized to individual medical records. Vertical farming that relies on hydroponics and aeroponics, will allow crops to be grown with 90% less water than traditional agriculture.

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Israeli company Security Matters’ solution can be applied to mark, track, and manage the supply chain of cannabis plants, cannabis products, and products containing cannabis-derived ingredients.

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Robots are taking over farms faster than expected as the first fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available. Autonomous tractors with specialized equipment will spray, plant, plow and weed cropland. They are much more precise, saving major costs.

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For the first time, some apples sold in the U.S. will be picked by a robot rather than humans. California start-up, Abundant Robotics, makes the apple harvesting machines that will be trialled in Washington State’s 2019 harvest, with an expectation of commercial availability in 2021. The robot moves down rows of orchards, using AI and LIDAR to search for ripe apples, and a robotic arm with a vacuum to gently suck the apples and deposit them into a bin.

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One of New Zealand’s largest food producers, T&G Global, has been working with US startup Abundant Robotics to create a robot that picks fruit when ripe for picking. The robot uses lidar to navigate the rows between the trees, and machine vision to identify which apples are ripe and which aren’t. It then uses a vacuum to gently “suck” apples off the trees.

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IBM has completed a trial of blockchain technology to track a shipment of 3,000 cartons of mandarin oranges from China to Singapore. The electronic bill of lading was recorded on a blockchain. The normal time of 5-7 days was eliminated, providing traceable and tamper-proof record storage, where 40% fraud involves documentation.

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Iron Ox has opened its first production facility in California. The 8,000-square-foot indoor hydroponic facility will be producing leafy greens at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads a year. This is the next step in the company’s vision of a fully autonomous farm where software and robotics fill the place of human agricultural workers.

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The Climate Corporation is gathering information from sensors on farming equipment and in the field, which is analyzed in the cloud. The company is building increasingly sophisticated models that help farmers understand which crop hybrids will produce greater yields under certain weather and soil conditions, or what fertilizer levels will be optimal in a particular setting – helping farmers produce 8 additional bushels of crops per acre.

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Boston-area Bloom Automation will deploy smart robots that can harvest the sensitive marijuana crop at twice the efficiency of human harvesters. The robotic harvester uses machine vision and path planning algorithms to isolate clusters of flowers, segmenting the plant into the flower, branch, and leaf for clipping effectiveness.

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Researchers in Israel and Europe have developed a robot (‘Sweeper’) that autonomously roams a greenhouse, finding peppers ready to be cut, saws them off the plant, and places them in a basket.

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Drones monitor construction sites, farms, and critical infrastructure, sending back real-time data, which is subjected to AI analysis to spot problems. This increases efficiency, reduces costs, and may spot problems humans might miss.

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Robots, like the one created by ecoRobotix, will be able to roll through fields, using computer vision to target and spray individual weeds as they go. EcoRobotix claims its robo-brigade will decrease total herbicide use by a factor of 20.

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Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is developing a small, artificial bee, currently in the format of a drone. Some plants can pollinate, only if there’s enough wind. Some plants need a current location of the pollination onto the flower itself. We are currently creating enough wind.

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Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has a long history of robotics research, with a fast-growing area being agriculture. Projects include a calibrated, intelligent sprayer that can identify grapes and leaves, applying sprays accurately; A small drone to pollinate flowers, and tomato flowers; and a sweet pepper harvesting-robot.

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Researchers from the University of Plymouth have created GummiArm, a soft robot capable of crop picking, which has two arms and soft joints. Cameras and sensors built into the robot’s ‘hands’ produce 3D models of objects in real-time, allowing the robot to assess which produce — such as cauliflower, cabbage, or broccoli — to pick or to leave. Soft joints and appendages backed up by robotic materials can provide the strength to pick without damaging crops. Commercialization is expected in the next two to three years.

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Drones are being used across the world, with the help of DroneDeploy software, to enable field surveillance, and detect issues (relating for example to weed detection and planting needs,), and provide farm equipment with the data to fix the issues. Drones only cost about $1,000, and the software another $1,000.

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Harper Adams University (UK) researchers have managed to plant, tend, and harvest 1.5 acres of barley using only autonomous vehicles and drones. No human set foot on the field, although remote management was required. Person-free precision farming seems like an increasingly viable way to help keep the world fed.

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Octinion, the Belgium R&D company, is building a robot that could replace traditional strawberry farming and harvesting. The robot is designed to work with the trending “tabletop” growing systems, where strawberries are grown in trays. The small robot moves through rows of strawberries, using machine vision to locate ripe, flawless berries, then reaching up with a 3D-printed hand to gently pluck each berry and place it in a basket for sale. If it feels that a berry isn’t ready for harvest, the robot estimates the date it will be ready for it to return and pick it. Pilot testing will begin with strawberry farmers in 2018, with sales expected in 2019. Plans are to adapt the robot to pick other produce like peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers.

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For the past 5 years, villagers in the Irrawaddy River delta in Myanmar have manually planted 2.7 million mangrove trees trying to restore an ecosystem that has been disappearing for decades. Drones, from startup BioCarbon Engineering, can plant up to 100,000 trees in a day, leaving the villagers to focus on care for the young trees. The drone technology involves a first pass to map the topography and soil quality, leading to a second pass to plant the best species in the best locations by firing seed pods to penetrate the soil.

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Multiple species of Glyphosate-resistant weeds are spreading in the main producing regions of Brazil, mainly where glyphosate-resistant crops, such as soybean, corn, and cotton, have been cultivated. Real-time localized weed spraying is based on plant identification by the sensor, and instant application of herbicide only on the target, working 24-hours/day. Critical is the extremely fast speed of the nozzle control valves.

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Robots roll through a fields spitting clouds of vapor while cutting lettuce heads with water knives – super-high-pressure beams – and gobbling up the produce. The heads roll up its mouth and onto a conveyor belt, where workers in hoodies and aprons grab the lettuce and tear off the loose leaves. California farms are facing a serious labor shortage of perhaps 20%. Robots pick up the slack, and jobs are not lost. Choice of lettuce types is adapted to the robot’s design.

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Abundant Robotics in California has built an automated apple picker, that recognizes ripe apples and uses a vacuum system to suck them off of the trees.

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The robot’s onboard cameras keep a watchful eye on crops so that large fields needn’t be constantly tended by farmers. It swings its arms to traverse a guy-wire strung up across a patch of land in a motion modeled after energy-efficient sloths.

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New Frontier Data’s annual overview of the cannabis industry found that the legal weed market will create close to 300,000 jobs by 2020. Forbes magazine reported that the market for legal cannabis, currently estimated at $7.2 billion, is projected to grow at a 17% annual rate.

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