Editor's Note:

As the year comes to a close, we've once again asked the DTN/Progressive Farmer reporting team to pick out the most significant, most fun, or otherwise their favorite, story of 2025. We hope you enjoy our writers' favorites, continuing the series with today's story by DTN Senior Machinery Editor Dan Miller.

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I found the opportunity at the January 2025 CES (formerly Consumer Electronics Show), in Las Vegas, Nevada, to sit down with Willy Pell, CEO of Blue River Technology.

Blue River is arguably ground zero in the development of agricultural precision technologies and Pell was there in earliest days.

Pell is a technologist and entrepreneur with a career pushing the boundaries of autonomy, robotics and machine learning. After earning a degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder, he began his career as a software engineer at Boeing. There, he became interested in work that pairs sophisticated software systems with real world sensing and control applications.

After Boeing, Pell went to 501 Systems, an early pioneer in autonomous vehicle technologies using early versions of computer vision, mapping and autonomy.

Pell went to work for Blue River Technology in 2012. It was -- and is -- a tech company that builds machine systems that "see and act," at scale within agricultural field systems.

Blue River opened its labs in 2011 with an idea to build autonomous lawn mowers. Co-founders Lee Redden and Jorge Heraud, Stanford-trained engineers with family backgrounds in agriculture, shopped the concept around among potential customers. But they found little interest.

They did find interest in smart implements with the precision to shift from a moving machine, desirable plants from plants that aren't -- and on an individual plant level spray undesirable plants, accurately across large farming systems.

Blue River's first see and act application was introduced in the form of LettuceBot in 2012.

In lettuce production, most young plants need to be removed, opening 10 inches of space between the remaining lettuce plants. Armed with 1 million lettuce images and quarter-inch accuracy, LettuceBot, a silver-colored box towed by a tractor, was soon thinning lettuce rows in Salinas Valley, California, and outside Yuma, Arizona.

By 2017, Blue River launched See & Spray, the technology targeting individual weeds with a non-residual herbicide. John Deere purchased Blue River that year for $305 million. Deere revealed the technology to the tech world at the 2020 CES in Las Vegas. In 2021, Deere introduced See & Spray Select for control of weeds in fallow fields. A year later, Deere launched See & Spray Ultimate, a two-tank system for treating weeds with residual and non-residual products in growing crops -- corn, soybeans and cotton.

Deere's See & Spray Ultimate technology uses 36 cameras and processors mounted to its carbon-fiber boom to scan the ground for weeds at 2,500 square feet per second (15 mph). See & Spray identifies and hits the weed in less time than the blink of an eye.

This same system also gathers data on-the-go that makes its precision sprays more accurate, even as the technology leads to new uses. For example, technologies that see and treat individual weeds today at speeds of 15 mph, able to identify weed species and produce a species map (soon to come), and not too far off, produce plant counts with a plant-by-plant health assessment.

"We saw this future," Pell said, "every single plant gets what it needs. No more. No less. Farmers will use fewer inputs and get better results."

In the Q&A I did with him, Pell discussed how the machines learn, the evolution of the technology, how the models are refined and how specific they are, and where does it go from here beyond treating weeds.

See Pell's interview with DTN/Progressive Farmer, "At the Dawn of Sense and Act Technology": https://www.dtnpf.com/….

There are competitors to Deere and its See & Spray technology. In the story presented with Pell's interview, "Sense and Act Tech for Precison Spray," I wrote about competing technologies from Greeneye Technology, Case IH and New Holland, Precision Planting and PTx Trimble. Read that story here: https://www.dtnpf.com/….

Dan Miller can be reached at dan.miller@dtn.com

Follow him on social platform X @DMillerPF

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