{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Getting Out of the Weeds with John Deere\u2019s Revolutionary AI Technology","description":"Imagine 1500 laptops strapped to a 120 foot (36 m) wide sprayer being pulled behind a tractor. That gives you a rough understanding of the compute power inside the John Deere See & SprayTM that targets herbicide to the weeds, not the crops. These might be \u201cthe smartest agricultural machines in the world,\u201d says Chris Padwick, Director of Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Blue River Technology, a wholly owned subsidiary of John Deere.  Padwick was not looking to return to his agricultural roots, but in a \u201cshields down\u201d moment\u201d he was approached by a startup, Blue River Technology. He recalls being \u201ccompletely blown away\u201d by what they were doing in computer vision. After initially developing a product for lettuce thinning, Blue River pivoted to the problem of row crop weeding. In the US alone, the agricultural industry uses over 20 million gallons of herbicide annually, almost all of it through broadcast spreading across the entire field. Blue River set to work on changing the paradigm to only spray the weeds. According to Padwick, this \u201cdot matrix printer for weeds\u201d has the potential to \u201csave 15 million gallons of herbicide\u201d and \u201cabout a billion dollars.\u201d  In this episode of the Moore\u2019s Lobby podcast, Padwick takes us behind the scenes to discuss the challenges of data collection in the fields, image classification, the compute technology that drives these real-time systems, and much more. On this business side, he reflects on the 2017 acquisition by John Deere and how important that was in their development of products at scale that can operate in rugged environments for two decades. \u201cI feel like we're going to look back on farming in five or ten years and we're just going to be amazed\u2026Precision spot spraying is going to be the way that people treat their crops going forward because it's going to allow them to save so much more chemical. And the sustainability in the environment is kind of unparalleled. So I really feel we're kind of at that inflection point for agriculture.\u201d So, listen in on this fun interview as Padwick describes: - His graduate research into Big Bang cosmology and background radiation - Why he left engineering as an undergrad\u2014seriously, universities we have to fix this outdated solution to engineering education! - Blue River\u2019s global operations to collect crop and weed images to drive continuous improvement   ","author_name":"Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits","author_url":"https:\/\/www.allaboutcircuits.com\/podcast\/","html":"