Verdant Robotics' SharpShooter Doesn't Miss

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

There’s a lot to see at the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California this week. But there’s only one place you can go to see a spray system with precision aiming capabilities. I’m talking about Verdant Robotics’ Sharpshooter, which co-founder and CEO Gabe Sibley says can reduce hand-weeding costs by 65%.

Sibley… “ The SharpShooter unit, it's really the only system in the world that aims before it applies inputs. So we can put something the size of your pinky nail all the way up to a dinner plate in the same pass. So the machine will make that decision in real time and it can shoot different chemistries, whatever the farmer wants to load in the gun it can apply, and it does neat things because of that aiming capability. Like, you know, it'll park a shot up underneath a head of lettuce that you just can't reach otherwise. It's the only system that'll put a drop on the meristem, a drop on the leaf, and a drop on a weed next to it. And just recently, this last summer, we started selling the machine for real as opposed to running it as a service. And it's been really fantastic having our customers put that machine to use on their own and see them getting value out of it and having them tell us the new features they want and pull us around by the nose so we can make 'em happy.”

Sibley added that the use cases start at weed control, but this level precision has a wide range of applications across many different crops.