Smart farm operations management company Fieldin has acquired Midnight Robotics, an autonomous agricultural systems firm.
The acquisition creates a first-of-its-kind combination of a sensor-based operational farming platform with autonomous driving technologies. The partnership added it aims to empower growers in the day-to-day management of farms.
Fieldin is currently deploying its combined autonomous farming platform in farms in California, US and plans additional deployments of the end-to-end system in the coming months.
Fieldin said its addition of Midnight Robotics’ deep robotic and autonomous driving technology enables an all-in-one solution to maximise accuracy and productivity on the farm. The platform collects farming data and turns it into actionable insights and now also offers guided decision-making and autonomous execution via driverless tractors and other machinery from within the same dashboard.
Furthermore, the onboarding of these new autonomous capabilities takes under a day, with Fieldin arriving at the farm and retrofitting tractors and other farming machinery with lidar-based autonomy kits that feed data back to the platform in real-time.
“Many people think that autonomous tractors are some magic solution, but at the end of the day, they’re just machinery—your autonomous farm can only be as good as your farm management data, and that’s why this acquisition is driving the autonomous farming revolution forward,” said Boaz Bachar, CEO and co-founder of Fieldin.
“Over the past eight years we’ve digitised hundreds of farms and over 10,000 tractors and pieces of farming equipment— more than anyone else in the high-value crop world— and amassed a trove of invaluable data that can offer insights into best practices in farm management.
“By acquiring Midnight Robotics, we’re helping farmers close the loop from insight to autonomous action, so they know exactly what they need to do and execute it autonomously, all through the same platform.”
