AI and robots in AgriFoodTech

Soil contaminated with toxic metals is one of the most stubborn environmental problems of our time. Lead, chromium, and uranium do not break down into harmless substances the way organic pollutants eventually do; they persist in the ground for decades, seeping into crops, groundwater, and ultimately the food chain. Traditional cleanup approaches, from digging out […]

Artificial intelligence promises to transform food safety by helping companies identify risks earlier, predict outbreaks and learn from patterns too rare for any one company to detect alone. But AI depends on one thing: large, diverse datasets.

The Farm Robotics Challenge launched its 2027 season on Sept. 15, unveiling a new three-division competition structure, a Startup pathway for teams committed to launching a company and more than $200,000 in prizes and startup support backed by a coalition of industry partners. Watch the 2027 Launch Webinar replay to learn about the new divisions, awards, Startup pathway and … The post Farm Robotics Challenge Launches 2027 Season appeared first on California Ag Network.

Food in Senegal is mostly grown on small-scale, rain-dependent farms, leaving much of the population vulnerable to climate shocks, according to the World Food Programme. However, satellite crop-mapping technologies designed to monitor the impact of climate on farming are largely beyond the reach of the West African country.

Smart farms run on a quiet promise: that the sensors watching soil moisture, temperature, and nutrient flow are telling the truth. When a sensor drifts, freezes, or fails outright, the automated systems that irrigate fields and regulate greenhouses can respond to fiction instead of fact, quietly overwatering crops or letting them dry out. A new […]

Every year, contaminated food sickens more than one in ten people worldwide and is estimated to cause over 4.2 million deaths, according to figures from the World Health Organization cited in a sweeping new review published in Food Science & Nutrition. Against that backdrop, researchers argue that artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic curiosity […]

McDonald's shares fell 4.81% after it unveiled its $8.5bn NEXT strategy to modernise restaurants and revive customer traffic amid weak sales.

The collaboration aims to advance agricultural resilience and crop-based carbon removal using AI technologies. Read more: Oracle and Wild Bio partner to advance AI-powered agriculture

The collaboration aims to advance agricultural resilience and crop-based carbon removal using AI technologies. Read more: Oracle and Wild Bio collab to advance AI-powered agriculture

Some Samsung Bespoke AI refrigerator owners in South Korea say an official SmartThings update caused cooling failures and other problems before Chuseok, prompting an emergency recovery operation.

Modern agriculture has quietly become one of the most data-intensive industries on the planet. Fields dotted with soil sensors, drones overhead, automated irrigation lines, and networked greenhouses generate continuous streams of telemetry that must be routed to cloud servers, analyzed, and turned into decisions within seconds. As farms scale up their digital infrastructure, the plumbing […]

The post Waymo Robotaxi Finds Itself in the Middle of Denver’s Farmers Market appeared first on Car Revs Daily.

Every autumn, across the rolling farmland of northern Europe, fleets of massive harvesters rumble through sugar beet fields, tearing the pale, tapering roots from the soil at a rate of dozens of tonnes per hour. It is a brutal, high-speed operation, and the crop pays a price. Beets get their tops sliced too deeply during […]

A substantial number of Samsung fridge owners have been left without any way to chill their food.

New research in Plants, People, Planet demonstrates how precision agriculture techniques involving drones and sensor-based irrigation can save water needed to produce tomatoes and grapes while also improving the quality of these crops.

Bitterness is one of the most stubborn problems in modern food production. During the fermentation of kefir, the ripening of Parmesan and mountain cheese, or the processing of protein powders and hydrolysates, proteins are broken down into smaller fragments called peptides. Some of these peptides bind to bitter taste receptors on the human tongue, and […]

Plant-based burgers, dairy-free cheeses, and meat analogues live or die by their texture, yet predicting how a new formulation will feel in the mouth remains one of the most stubborn challenges in food science. Mechanical and rheological properties of dense food structures emerge from tangled interactions among proteins, polysaccharides, moisture, and processing history, so two […]

Every year, the world applies millions of tonnes of agrochemicals to crops and consumes billions of doses of pharmaceuticals, yet the safety story rarely ends when these compounds do their intended job. Once released into soil, water, and the human body, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and drugs are transformed by sunlight, microbes, plants, and metabolism into […]

The Wargame on Sky TV is adding a biting sense of realism to Russia developments in the news this week — but critical scenes have been created using AI.

As heat waves, frosts and droughts increasingly batter the world’s wheat fields, a team of researchers in China has unveiled a deep learning model that can predict winter wheat yields with remarkable accuracy—and do so roughly a month before harvest, even in years dominated by extreme climate events. The model, called MBF-HybridNet, was developed and […]

Researchers affiliated with the SETI Institute propose screening lunar soil with AI for microscopic technosignatures, while stressing that the study presents no evidence of extraterrestrial technology

Norway's first fully automated facility for vegetable production was put into operation last fall. This spring, the first products hit store shelves.

From horse-drawn ploughs to autonomous tractors, Ireland’s National Ploughing Championships brought together the traditions and technologies shaping modern farming, serving as a vital meeting point for the wider European agricultural community.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra spent hours just farming potatoes after dying and losing all of its gear during a Minecraft test.

JACKSON, Tenn. — Precision agriculture technologies can help producers maximize land productivity and make informed management decisions. To assist Tennessee growers in determining which of these innovations are most beneficial for their individual operations, the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture (UTIA) has appointed José Peiretti as its new row crop precision agriculture management Extension […] The post UTIA Appoints New Precision Agriculture Extension Specialist for Row Crops appeared first on Morning Ag Clips.

Industry resource outlines how AI-enabled equipment supports farm productivity, efficiency and decision-making. The post From Assistance to Autonomy: How AI Is Changing Agricultural Equipment appeared first on CropLife.

Artificial intelligence is quietly rewriting the rules of farming, and one of the most consequential shifts is happening not in the cloud but in the fields themselves. A new systematic literature review published in Smart Agricultural Technology maps, for the first time, how distributed machine learning is being deployed across precision agriculture, synthesizing evidence from […]

A quiet revolution is unfolding across the world’s farmland, one articulated arm and autonomous wheel at a time. A new state-of-the-art review published in the International Journal of Intelligent Robotics and Applications takes stock of how robotics is reshaping agriculture, from the strawberry rows of Japan to the wheat belt of China, and delivers a […]

A team of researchers has unveiled a machine learning framework capable of predicting one of the most important properties of biochar with remarkable precision, potentially transforming how scientists and industry engineers design carbon-rich materials for agriculture and environmental cleanup. The study, published in Current Research in Biotechnology, demonstrates that an optimized Gradient Boosting Decision Tree […]

MASON, Ohio — American agriculture is short on hands and long on acres. Farmers and ranchers now lean on artificial intelligence and smart systems to close that gap, from autosteering tractors to sensor-driven barns. The technology already works the land in more ways than most producers realize, and the reach keeps growing. The Labor Squeeze […] The post How AI and Smart Systems Can Reduce Strain From Labor Shortages in the Agricultural Industry appeared first on Morning Ag Clips.

Packaging already tells us where food comes from, when it was made, what's in it and how many calories it contains. But researchers see a future where packaging can "see," in real time, what's happening inside and translate that into information that producers and consumers can act on.

DJI drones that already supply Mount Everest camps assist Nepal’s flood relief.

China’s GEAIR 2.0 humanoid robot pollinates tomato flowers in under 10 seconds, combining AI, robotics and gene editing for crop breeding and farm automation. The post China’s GEAIR 2.0 Robot Pollinates Crops in Under 10 Seconds appeared first on TechRepublic.

Multi-billion-dollar buildouts for AI partners, but an increasing number of food-stamp recipients among one's employees?

High above the fields of the Morven Sustainability Lab, drones equipped with heat and light sensors are changing

Ledger and Trezor said researchers have a responsibility to publish their findings if vendors fail to fix bugs within an agreed disclosure window.

Artificial intelligence is often celebrated for its ability to predict things: yields, droughts, outbreaks, prices. But a sweeping new systematic review of research on sub-Saharan Africa argues that prediction alone is the wrong benchmark for judging what AI can do for the continent’s farmers. What matters, the authors contend, is whether machine intelligence can build […]

JD helps farmers turn years of field, machine, and operational data into practical insights while keeping farmers in control at every step. The post John Deere Introduces JD, the AI Assistant That Helps Farmers Put Their Data to Work appeared first on CropLife.

Discover how data, sustainability programs, and trusted relationships are coming together to create new opportunities across agriculture. The post Tech Talk: How Agriculture’s Most Trusted Distributors Become Its AI Infrastructure appeared first on CropLife.

Something strange is happening in the way humanity talks about its greatest crisis. While greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere and global temperatures continue their relentless climb, researchers across multiple disciplines are documenting an equally significant phenomenon: the words, metaphors, and narrative frames we use to comprehend climate change are proving inadequate to the task. […]

There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken. There's also construction material masquerading as ice cream, ice cream masquerading as brains, and other masonry-adjacent cuisine. I don't even know how to begin describing this monstrous attempt of a burger, and the less said about the trypophobic burrito from hell, grubs and all, the better. There are lumps. And holes. So many holes. "Diffusion mo … Read the full story at The Verge.

Scientists from Leeds' School of Food Science and Nutrition have developed an advanced AI process that can rapidly identify plant proteins capable of acting as emulsifiers from tens of millions of initial candidates. To date, it has identified nearly 800. The discovery will cut years of costly trial-and-error research and bring the next generation of plant-based foods and cosmetics closer.

MOA Foodtech grows non-GMO yeast strains that convert a wide variety of food and ag side streams into high-value ingredients. The post MOA Foodtech nets $3.8m to scale AI-powered biomass fermentation platform appeared first on AgFunderNews.

Plus: Defra grans and more farmland funding around the world The post AgriFood Signals: Remembering Wendell Berry, Farmland LP’s new fund, Dairy Queen robots appeared first on AgFunderNews.

Restaurant menus with AI-generated food images are going viral for their off-putting aesthetic. But AI’s impact on modern menus runs even deeper.

Fitbit users are reporting Google Health’s AI logging wildly incorrect food metrics.

A new technical conference for AI and ag tech entrepreneurs, as well as investors, launched last week as 300 gathered for Ruggedize, a first of its kind meeting, at Reservoir Farms.

For too long, the United States has relied on foreign sources for most of the raw materials powering its technological future: the essential minerals in every smartphone, battery pack and semiconductor. What if one answer to the supply crisis isn't buried in a mine shaft but growing quietly in a field? Scientists are betting on a resource-efficient, highly effective strategy: using engineered plants and symbiotic microbes to absorb critical minerals directly from the Earth in a process called phytomining.

John Deere has launched JD, an AI assistant that answers plain-language questions from a farm’s own machine and field data, alongside a ten-point voluntary Farmer Data Commitment. In the EU those commitments are largely obligations under the Data Act, which also bars a manufacturer from using the data to work out what a farm is […] This story continues at The Next Web

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Agtrinsic today [Sept. 2, 2026] announced the introduction of its Disease Intelligence Engine in South Asia, with an initial focus on making advanced crop disease technology accessible to smallholder farmers. Agtrinsic is working with a team based in the region to develop and bring a mobile application to market that reflects local […] The post Agtrinsic Expands AI Disease Intelligence Technology to South Asia’s Smallholder Farmers appeared first on Morning Ag Clips.

Stevie Bonifield / The Verge: John Deere is testing JD, an AI assistant for farmers, to help with best practices and find trends based on farmers' “field, machine, and operational data”  —  The new ‘JD’ AI uses farmers' own data to answer questions about their operations and equipment.

John Deere is testing a new "JD" AI assistant that it says can help farmers make more money, with answers about best practices and historical trends that are based on their own data. It uses their "field, machine and operational data" to answer questions on topics like equipment settings, fuel usage, or harvest timing. The press release didn't mention which AI technology is behind this platform. But after fighting with farmers and the FTC for years over the right to repair, the news of Early Access Program testing for this bot comes with a mention of its ten-point Farmer Data Commitment saying it won't sell the data, and lets farmers cont … Read the full story at The Verge.

A federal watchdog found that Amazon workers on food stamps and Medicaid have nearly tripled since 2020, as the retailer plans $200 billion in AI spending and taxpayers foot the bill.

High above the fields of the Morven Sustainability Lab, drones equipped with heat and light sensors are changing what it means to farm smarter. This month, researchers and students from the University of Virginia, NASA and the University at Buffalo tested drone technology by flying more than 100 feet (30 meters) above crops to measure plant health at UVA's 2,900-acre (1,170-hectare) research facility.

John Deere is making a John Deere AI investment of $10 million through a new three-year research and development partnership aimed at bringing artificial intelligence from the laboratory to the farm. The ... Read More The post John Deere Invests $10 Million in AI Research for High-Value Crops appeared first on AgNet West.

As AI reshapes agriculture, who should control farm data, and how can growers ensure they benefit from the value it creates? The post Controlling Farm Data in the AI Age appeared first on CropLife.

The Farm Just Got a Brain: Landmark Review Reveals AI Is Quietly Rewiring How the World Grows Its Food By 2050 the world will need to feed 9.7 billion people, rising to 10.9 billion by the end of the century, and the agricultural systems that carried humanity through the past century are buckling under the […]

Own the Robot or Hire It? The Two Very Different Roads Leading German Farmers Toward Autonomous Agriculture Autonomous field robots have been promised to agriculture for years: mobile machines that would prepare soil, sow seeds, weed rows, treat pests and even harvest crops under human supervision but without a human at the controls. On German […]

The Days-Long Wait to Catch Deadly Bacteria Is Collapsing—Under the Gaze of Light and AI For more than a century, the workhorse of bacterial detection has been essentially unchanged: smear a sample onto a gel-like plate, wait one to three days for colonies to grow, then run a battery of biochemical and serological tests to […]

The X Safety Team said that at least 200 bot accounts have been making posts to influence public opinion data centers and energy policy. The accounts share links to legitimate news stories and then add their own spin designed to inflame emotions.

X found a bot farm in its investigation of inauthentic Chinese accounts. Out of 200,000 bots, 200 allegedly focused on posting against AI data centers.

Soil may look still and silent, but beneath every forest floor lies a dynamic carbon system that influences food security, ecosystem health, and the pace of climate change. Now, researchers in China have developed a deep-learning model designed to predict how much organic carbon is stored in soil by combining environmental information across multiple spatial […]

A small mushroom farm can have a genuinely good product and still lose a sale online because the only photo available is a phone shot taken in a dim grow room, mushrooms piled in a plastic crate, nothing that makes anyone want to buy at any price. An AI Image Generator offered within Higgsfield gives […] This information How Small-Scale Specialty Farmers Are Using AI Image Tools to Market Farm Products Online Without a Photography Budget appeared first on AgriFarming

Intelinair, an automated crop intelligence company that uses AI and machine learning to help growers and agronomic advisors […] The post Intelinair Named “AI-based AgTech Innovation of the Year” in 2026 AgTech Breakthrough Awards Program appeared first on CropLife.

Earlier, a source in the judicial system said the Volgograd Regional Court had terminated the proceedings in the case of 66‑year‑old Nikolay Mukhin

The attackers are exploiting internet-facing Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers to scout for potential targets.

AI-generated food images matched real food images in perceived healthiness and estimated calorie content but were rated as less realistic and elicited lower willingness to eat. A subset of hyperrealistic AI images received stronger appetitive ratings, suggesting that perceived realism may shape how synthetic food imagery is evaluated.

A farming family in Kentucky has rejected a $26.48 million offer on their land amid a wider push against AI data centers, WSJ has reported Read Full Article at RT.com

Serve Robotics, the sidewalk-delivery company that spun out of Uber, has added Grubhub to its roster of partners, a move that quietly turns it into something close to the neutral plumbing of America’s food-delivery robot business. Through a deal with Wonder, Grubhub’s parent, Serve’s cooler-sized bots will start carrying takeaway orders placed on the Grubhub […] This story continues at The Next Web

Blake Hurst spent a decade running the state's largest farm lobby. Now he's publicly courting the developers his neighbors froze out.

In turn, the IHA agency reported the discovery of drone wreckage of unknown origin on the coast in Istanbul’s Arnavutkoy district

In the US, says Isaac Mazor, “manual citrus harvesting costs around $42–43 per 900-lb field bin, versus $25-30 using our technology.” The post Inside Nanovel’s bid to crack robotic citrus harvesting appeared first on AgFunderNews.

A Chinese farmer reportedly lost nearly 25 acres of sesame after following AI pesticide advice, highlighting the risks of trusting chatbot recommendations. The post A Farmer Trusted AI’s Advice. It Cost Him 25 Acres of Crops appeared first on TechRepublic.

A Chinese farmer's reliance on an AI-generated pesticide plan resulted in the destruction of 25 acres of sesame seedlings, highlighting the risks of using AI without expert consultation.

Relying on incorrect and unverified information from an AI chatbot resulted in a farmer in China destroying his crops.

A farmer in Anhui province lost 25 acres of sesame after following AI-generated pesticide advice, underscoring the risks of relying on AI without expert verification

Combining drone data and machine learning can help cover more ground in monitoring forest soil health, University of Alberta research shows. The findings are published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. Using both tools to map and monitor soil fungal diversity—a key indicator of a healthy forest ecosystem—proved highly effective and could help reduce the need for boots-on-the-ground soil sampling over huge areas of forest, says Dr. Cameron Carlyle, a professor in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences and a co-author of the study.

A farmer in China followed an AI app's advice for his 25-acre farmland, resulting in the death of his entire crop of sesame seedlings. 67-year-old man was initially skeptical of the tool but eventually trusted it after months of using it.

Microplastics, which are plastic particles under 5 millimeters, are a major and growing threat in both soil and water. They damage soil fertility, disrupt nutrient cycling, harm aquatic and terrestrial life, and can move through the food chain. That makes cleaning them up an urgent priority.

A new computer model is one of the first artificial intelligence tools to advance scientific discovery in agriculture

New platform combines continuous root-zone sensing with artificial intelligence to deliver actionable agronomic insights throughout the growing season. The post AquaSpy Rebrands as UnderGround Weather, Introducing the World’s First AI Soil Intelligence Reporting Engine appeared first on CropLife.

Monster Wolf and Pochi are among the robots deployed to scare away bears and transport cherry blossoms in a northern region where many farmers are in their 70s or older.

Monster Wolf and Pochi are among the robots deployed to scare away bears and transport cherry blossoms in a northern region where many farmers are in their 70s or older.

The Ask Maps updates aim to “make it easier than ever to get more done.” | Image: Google The AI-powered "Ask Maps" tool in Google Maps can now perform a broader range of personalized and conversational requests, including ordering food, finding hotels, and providing suggestions that factor in your existing plans. These are among several new features announced for Ask Maps today, which aim to "make it easier than ever to get more done" without having to close the Google Maps app, according to Google Maps head, Miriam Daniel. New agentic capabilities include asking Maps to order you food while considering contextual information like specific dietary needs, location, and places you've saved. For example, Google says you can ask it … Read the full story at The Verge.

A Northern Kentucky family has refused an anonymous AI company's $26 million offer to buy their land and transform it into a data center.

CJ CheilJedang utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to preempt global food market trends and innovatively shorten the product development cycle.CJ CheilJedang announced on Aug. 6 that it officially launched ‘Food AI 360,’ an AI platform that integrates real-time trend analysis, product planning, an

People tell the AI boom as a story about chips and models. Underneath it is metal. Every data centre, chip, power line and robot starts with copper and a handful of other minerals. The United States has quietly lost control of where they come from. A two-year-old startup just raised $310m to change that. Mariana […] This story continues at The Next Web

A £20 million competition has opened to develop farm robots and automated technology for crops, livestock, horticulture and forestry. Agr...

Your next drive-thru order might be taken by a bot. And you might not even notice.

Willie Nelson urges Americans to fight data centers invading rural Texas land, warning of light pollution and water thieving near his Abbott home.

DoorDash secured FAA approval to launch DoorDash Air, an in-house drone delivery service, joining Wing, Zipline, and Amazon as one of only eight certified US drone operators.

AI in agriculture depends not only on access to data, but on whether that data is timely, consistent, calibrated, and usable within real-world systems. The post Agriculture Doesn’t Just Need Data. It Needs AI-Ready Data. appeared first on CropLife.

To offset an ageing agricultural workforce and boost sustainable yields, China is aggressively accelerating the adoption of farm drones – a trend that analysts say could spread to more emerging markets despite trade restrictions imposed by the United States. Industry leader DJI said its global sales of agricultural drones had exceeded 700,000 units across China and more than 100 other countries and regions by the end of last month – more than a fivefold increase in just five years. Use of the...

Artificial intelligence could reshape how farms manage nitrogen by treating the nitrogen cycle as a single, connected system that links crop growth, livestock feeding, manure recycling, and environmental monitoring. A new perspective in Nitrogen Cycling argues that the long-standing separation between crop production and livestock operations has fragmented nutrient flows, causing manure to accumulate near […]

NIH researchers found that four AI calorie apps underestimated meals by 250 to 345 calories. High fat dishes had the largest errors.

A US report reveals Amazon workers' SNAP enrolment has tripled since 2020, sparking criticism from Senator Sanders amidst the company's $200 billion AI investment plans.

ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell University researchers have introduced BINN (Biogeochemistry-Informed Neural Network), an AI model designed to speed up and improve how scientists simulate Earth-system processes in agriculture and biogeochemistry. The team reports that BINN is about 50 times more efficient than earlier approaches while achieving similarly accurate estimates of soil organic carbon. The study, […]

A new computer model is one of the first artificial intelligence tools to advance scientific discovery in agriculture and biogeochemistry and is 50 times more efficient than its predecessors, according to a study that offers a proof-of-principle for how AI might be used to shed light on obscure biological processes.

Buildout of large AI data centers in regions historically specializing on agriculture may have long-lasting

China’s agriculture sector needs more advanced technology and innovation to boost yields and improve food security – not more farmland and crops, according to a rural policy expert. The remarks came after a state media investigation alleged that officials in central China had inflated the size of mandatory rice crops to hit their targets. CCTV programme Focus Report aired its investigation on July 14, claiming officials in Jianghua Yao – a county in Yongzhou, Hunan province – had misreported the...