The limited availability of skilled personnel in agriculture has led - in some measure - to an over-reliance on capital intensive machinery, synthetic chemicals, and simplified agricultural practices. In turn, the consequences have been variously less than ideal agricultural outcomes and adverse impact on the environment, on food quality, and farmer profitability. Add in increasing unpredictability of weather and frequent extreme weather events and the consequences are a growing global population having food security. To tackle some of these conditions, EarthSense has developed an agricultural robotics and AI platform with three key applications: (1) next generation of more productive and sustainable crops, (2) helping growers obtain actionable intelligence from their fields, and (3) managing problems like herbicide resistant weeds. By careful design, the EarthSense platform is built to be modular and easily extensible - so that other people can easily participate in innovating in the next generation of robotics and AI technology potentially enabling a climate-smart agricultural system, improved plant and soil health, eduction in use of chemicals and other expensive inputs. EarthSense is creating dramatic new possibilities for crop breeders, plant protection products developers, crop scientists, and field agronomists; the firm's first robot,TerraSentiaâimproves the quantity, accuracy, cost and speed of in-field plant trait data collection, especially for under-canopy traits that cannot be obtained by other technologies. The firm's machine learning based analytics convert field data to specific, actionable information about plant-traits
