February 2019 - 6

WEEDER
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
want to get in line.
Of concern to many vegetable growers
are weeds that over time may develop
resistance to herbicides, steeply growing
labor costs and availability of weeding
crews. A survey by the California Farm
Bureau in 2017 found seven out of 10
farmers hiring seasonal workers in
California reported a labor shortage.
Boyer said at this time they're planning
to sell the machine's weeding services
rather than the device itself. He declined
to give a price for the weeding services,
which he said could vary based on a
number of variables.
" I can't give you any exact number, " he
said. " Our goal is to be competitive with
current processes. So really, what we are
trying to do here is save growers money
on their very first acres they are using the
machines on, which means that our price
per acre is competitive, and most of the
time cheaper than what they're currently
experiencing. "
A Detroit automotive manufacturer will
build " the next generation " of FarmWise's
machines during 2019, although Boyer
didn't say exactly how many would be built.
" We'll start a process of manufacturing
machines on a fairly regular basis, " he said.
" We'll build them and deploy them starting
late spring 2019. "
At first, the machines will be mostly
Brains behind FarmWise
Sebastien Boyer is the founder and CEO of FarmWise. He previously
The FarmWise machine is being used on
vegetable crops including cauliflower and
lettuce.
available to large vegetable growers
from California.
" We are encouraging and prioritizing
growers who are able to integrate it into
their workflow and help us improve that
machine greatly, " he said. " We're focusing
on vegetable growers, people growing
brassicas, green leaves, lettuce, cauliflower,
cabbage, broccoli, celery - those types of
growers, which is our primary target for
now. In the long run, we expect a similar
use, to be able to work on even more crops,
whether strawberries, those types of crops,
but also broader acreage type of crops. "
As a startup, FarmWise has enjoyed
support and recognition from the
agriculture and tech communities for some
time. The Western Growers' Center for
Innovation and Technology has financially
supported FarmWise and housed it
as a startup-in-residence in 2017. The
worked as a mathematician for IBM Research and a data scientist for
Facebook. He holds a master's degree in electrical engineering and
computer science from MIT, where he studied machine learning and
recent advances in computer vision. While at MIT, he won the Machine
Learning for the Digital Economy competition. He is passionate
about developing technologies that address long-term environmental
sustainability problems. Boyer was named among the 35 European
Innovators Under 35's list by MIT Technology Review in 2019, as well as
the Forbes 30 under 30 list the same year.
Thomas Palomares is the co-founder and chief technology officer
of FarmWise. He's been passionate about farming since his childhood
when he would spend weekends at his grandparents' dairy farm in
France. Before co-founding FarmWise, he was a research assistant
at Stanford University's Department of Computer Science and worked
as a data scientist at IBM Research and TrueCar. Palomares holds a
master's degree in management science and engineering from Stanford
University. He has been named in the prestigious list of 30 Under 30 by
Forbes Magazine in the Manufacturing and Industry category.
company was part of Lemnos and THRIVE
accelerator programs. In December 2017, it
secured $5.7 million of seed money from a
group of investors led by the venture capital
firm Playground.
Former Salinas mayor Dennis Donohue,
who is director of Western Growers Center
for Innovation and Technology, was
quoted in a release praising FarmWise's use
of artificial intelligence.
" FarmWise's choice to leverage Al
algorithms and adapt them to the farming
industry is making it possible for one
machine to work on most of the growers'
fields from lettuce to carrots, broccoli and
so on - a possibility never seen before since
the invention of the tractor in the first half
of the 20th century, " he said.
Boyer said he and co-founder Thomas
Palomares started the company with
the vision of developing autonomous
machines to farm every single plant for
greater yield, better farmer's profits and a
healthier environment.
" We believe in robotics and AI being
able to assist growers, " he said. VGN
6 | VegetableGrowersNews.com
http://www.VegetableGrowersNews.com
February 2019

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