John Deere advancing machine learning in agriculture sector

The food and agriculture chain is one of the most promising industries where the Internet of Things (IoT) can bring about transformational changes. And this transformation includes building smart farm machines to manage crops at the plant level. To that end, John Deere Labs, which opened its doors earlier this year, made its first major deal on September 6, spending $305 million to acquire Blue River Technology, a startup with computer vision and machine learning technology that can identify weeds–making it possible to spray herbicides only where they're needed. Currently, on a global basis, $25 billion is spent each year on about 3.0 billion pounds of herbicides. This has resulted in over 250 species of weeds now considered resistant to herbicides.