FieldIn's Ground Rules for Automation

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

California-based FieldIn wants to take specialty crop growers on a journey from digitization to autonomy. In order to assess when automation should be implemented, COO and co-founder Iftach Birger said they’ve developed a set of ground rules.

Birger… “We have very basic rules about autonomy. It's need to provide our ROI from day one. It needs to be very easy to use. It cannot be something complicated. And it needs to be a risk mitigator, meaning that the grower is not to be concerned. They need to understand what they're seeing. Because you know, we are humans in here. Like I, I am also concerned of stuff that I cannot understand. So this is our basic rules and, and, and we started with something that is, in terms of autonomous, with the LIDAR, is become much more accurate on your spraying. With the spray, you can see you are not replacing the person in the cab and you can start to implement commercial things that save a lot of chemicals and a lot of cost, and also increase your utilization of machine. So basically the LIDAR is seeing the trees and open and close the valves based on what it's seeing.”

Birger added one more additional rule: that the automation has to be performing a task that a human cannot easily and repeatedly do themselves instead.