John Deere Robot Planter: The Future of Farming Looks Like Fewer Chemicals - CNET

As the global population soars past 8 billion people, the world faces a conundrum: There are more of us to feed, but our food needs to be grown on the same amount of land, if not less. At CES 2023, John Deere is pushing for a future in which farming relies ever more on sensors and machine learning technologies to meet those needs. When you add in the realities of a changing climate that is shifting growing seasons and making weather patterns less predictable, it's clear that the farm of the future will require radical change. John Deere's latest foray into high-tech agriculture is a sensor-driving robotic technology called ExactShot that's designed to reduce fertilizer use by as much as 60%, saving farmers money and slashing the amount of excess chemicals that go into the ground. John Deere is bringing more robots into the farm field with new technology that can precisely fertilize individual seeds. Instead of shooting a steady stream of fertilizer into the soil over the seeds as they're planted in rows by machinery, the company's ExactShot technology uses sensors and robotics to send out timed bursts of fertilizer that coat individual seeds, leaving the spaces between them fertilizer-free.