The Fertile Common Ground Between Technology and Agriculture

At first glance, Silicon Valley and the vast cornfields of the U.S. Midwest may appear to have little in common. But a growing relationship between big data and agriculture is poised to improve yields, reduce raw material use and decrease production costs. Over the past year, the precision agriculture industry, which has pioneered the use of unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics to increase data collection and efficiency in agriculture, has continued to expand in the United States and around the world. As drone use in agriculture becomes even more prevalent and new achievements in machine learning and artificial intelligence are made, high technologies -- the internet of things, big data, robotics and artificial intelligence -- will overlap with agriculture more and more....