Can John Deere become one of the leading AI and robotics companies in the world alongside Tesla and Silicon Valley technology giants over the next decade? That notion may seem incongruous with the general perception of the 185-year-old company as a heavy-metal manufacturer of tractors, bulldozers and lawnmowers painted in the signature green and yellow colors. But that is what the company sees in its future, according to Jorge Heraud, vice president of automation and autonomy for Moline, Illinois-based Deere, a glimpse of which was showcased at last January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Deere unveiled its fully autonomous 8R farm tractor, driven by artificial intelligence rather than a farmer behind the wheel. The autonomous 8R is the culmination of Deere's nearly two decades of strategic planning and investment in automation, data analytics, GPS guidance, internet-of-things connectivity and software engineering. While a good deal of that R&D has been homegrown, the company also has been on a spree of acquisitions and partnerships with agtech startups, harvesting know-how as well as talent.

John Deere has been in business for nearly 200 years. For those in the agriculture industry, the company that makes green tractors is as well-known as Santa Claus, McDonald's, or John Wayne. Heck, even city folk who've never seen a tractor that wasn't on a television screen know John Deere. The company's so popular even celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and George Clooney have been known to rock a Deere hat. What most outsiders don't know is that John Deere's not so much a farming vehicle manufacturer these days as it is an agricultural technology company.

The future of computer vision and machine learning can be seen trundling at about 1 mile per hour at a lettuce field in the Salinas Valley of California. In certain fields, a tractor is pulling a highly specialized robot called the "lettuce bot." The robot, made by Blue River Technology, contains enough smarts to differentiate the weeds from the budding lettuce plants and then kill those weeds with an injection of fertilizer. The result is a weed-free field without the use of expensive and harmful pesticides -- making Blue River's robot a threat to the $31-billion pesticide business and a friend of organic farmers. The startup, founded in 2011, on Monday said it has raised $3.1 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures.

The US is facing an agricultural worker shortage, along with aging farm owners, at the same time it juggles demand in food from a global population boom. If we're being blunt, those elements added together would mean farmers and production are straight screwed. Luckily, some engineers and researchers are creating robots that are already beginning to ease the load. Blue River Technology in Sunnyvale, California is testing "See and Spray"-- machine learning and AI software inside a robotic tractor attachment that aims to change the chemical game. The program can recognize the difference between crops and weeds, then sprays herbicide only on the unwanted plant.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company makes farming machines. "I bet we're the only startup with a tractor behind our offices," CEO Jorge Heraud says. Nevertheless, it is still very much a tech startup. Blue River's machines are robots that help farmers manage their fields more efficiently. The old-school approach is to drench an entire field in weed-killing chemicals, but Blue River combines computer vision and sophisticated machine learning algorithms to spray selectively.

In a world reached a population of six billion humans increasingly demand it for food, feed with a water shortage and the decline of agricultural land and the deterioration of the climate needs 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land and in case of failure to combat pests needs about 4 billion hectares. Weeds represent 34% of the whole pests while insects, diseases and the deterioration of agricultural land present the remaining percentage. Weeds identification has been one of the most interesting classification problems for Artificial intelligence and image processing. The most common case is to identify weeds within the field as they reduce the productivity and harm the existing crops. Success in this area results in an increased productivity, profitability and at the same time decreases the cost of operation.

The tool, called Zea, has been under development for a year and a half, and like the lettuce robot, uses computer-based vision to scan farm fields and gather data about crops. Blue River Technology is starting out by selling its 3D crop scanning tool as a service to corn plant breeders (with a fee per acre) who are keenly interested in gathering information about crops grown from various seeds in field trials. The breeders want to measure attributes of the crops such as the size of leaves, the effect of drought on plants, and how quickly crops are growing. Evaluating crop breeding field trials is currently a tedious task that is mostly done manually by breeders walking down fields with analog tools, such as rulers. Fields sometimes need to be scanned multiple times to determine how quickly crops are growing. The company's initial corn breeder customers are mostly working in the midwest's corn belt, but Blue River is also working with farms in California to gather data about trials for drought-tolerant crops.