Autonomy is always one of the biggest topics talked about here at FIRA USA. Earlier there was a panel where the topic of cover crops came up in terms of autonomy and let’s take a listen on why it might be important to just pay a little more attention to cover crops when you’re dealing with AI or autonomous farm equipment. 

“Some of the challenges we typically run into are really around how these environments are set up. You might have uneven terrain. You might have certain scenarios where the ground cover exists. You might have certain scenarios where the actual task you’re doing — maybe you’re trying to mow a cover crop but it’s the beginning of the season and the cover crop is 3 feet tall. How do you actually effectively build an autonomous solution that understands the difference between what’s safe to actually touch and what’s the responsibility of the task you are trying to solve for. You have dust, you have fog, you have all kinds of different types of scenarios. You might have water or low spots that the vehicle might get stuck in or muddy conditions. And if you can’t solve for all these different types of scenarios from an autonomous perspective then the value proposition of these vehicles doing automated work is really limited because someone is always going to have to go help these systems out. So how do we think about building an autonomy solution that allows you to handle all of these different types of scenarios? And that is really what Agtonomy has been focused on the last few years.”

Well that’s all for this week’s cover crop connection. We’ll have lots more content for you in the coming weeks from FIRA USA.