If CES 2023 was any indication, the farm tech sector is really growing. There were new drones that check your crops, vertical gardens you manage from your phone and robots designed for every possible task.
Here’s a look at a few tech devices possibly heading to a farm near you this year.
SentiV Robot Crop-Scouting Drone
Some days, all you really need is the ability to be in three places at once. Until someone builds a teleporter to get us around, the SentiV scouting drone could lend a helping hand.
Designed by Meropy, the SentiV is a lightweight, autonomous drone that will fly through your fields and cover almost 50 acres in a day. Incredibly, this drone can take in more data than you can, scanning your vegetation for threats, monitoring growth and sensing nutrient and water requirements with a glance.
Have the First Smart Farm Stand on Your Block
When you have a farm stand where you sell eggs, produce or freshly baked bread, you need a place to store your wares before your customer picks them up. That’s where Chekt comes in.
Chekt is a smart food locker system designed to automate how you sell food. The food locker can be switched from hot to cold depending on what you’re selling. Your customers will receive a text that lets them open up the door and take their purchase.
The Evolution of Robot Dogs
While we’re not quite at the point where we can bring home a robot dog to patrol our farms at night, there were a lot of robot dogs revealed at CES 2023 that show the technology may eventually trend that way.
Some robot dogs like Dog-E—a soft, smart robotic dog with artificial intelligence—are more of a family pet. Dog-E can learn tricks, has his own personality and is affectionate to his family.
Other robot dogs, like Aeo, will offer a helping hand in the house. Designed for older adults, this robot can deliver food, lift heavy objects, disinfect surfaces and ensure your medicine is taken at the right time of day.
Read more: John Deere is ready to tech out your tractor!
Don’t Look Now, but There’s a Robot Picking Your Peppers
If you own a farm where peppers are your main food crop, you might be interested in Agrist. Agrist L. Robot, or ‘L’ for short, is a pepper-harvesting robot that can pick through layers of leaves and harvest your pepper crop quickly and precisely.
It has enhanced vision and an AI algorithm to determine which peppers are ready to be picked. And it can find the best clipping point so your peppers are harvested the right way. To move, L will slides along a suspension system that can be set up to fit any farm.
Yard Robots Take over Shoveling Snow & More
The Yarbo 3-in-1 robot can take over a lot of time-draining outdoor chores. It’s a lawn care robot, snow-blowing robot and leaf-blowing robot, all in one.
With tank-like treads, it can roll over all types of terrain. And it has an outdoor charging system that lets you keep it outside without worrying about exposing it to the weather. It’s also an autonomous robot so you don’t have to steer it or monitor it while it’s running, and it uses GPS to map out a pathway and stay on track. To switch tasks, you just change the attachment.
Vertical Gardening Is on an Upward Trend
If your farm is located in a climate that keeps you on a seasonal schedule, you may be interested in the new vertical gardens announced at CES 2023. One of them, the Rise Garden, is a modular, indoor vertical garden that looks a lot like a bookcase. This garden has LED full spectrum lights to replace sunshine and is both self-watering and self-fertilizing. With Wi-Fi on board, you can check in on your produce just by looking at the app.
While some of these farm tech devices are prototypes, others are ready or will be ready for purchase this year. Which would you choose for your hobby farm in 2023?
