Our mission is to create intelligent machinery that solves monumental challenges for our customers.
Why it Matters
We empower our customers – farmers – to implement more sustainable solutions: optimize chemical usage, reimagine routine processes, and improve farming yields year after year.
We believe that focusing on the small stuff – pixel-by-pixel and plant-by-plant – leads to big gains.
We aren’t just working on technology; we are making a positive impact through technology. Through innovating and optimizing solutions for our customers, we’re creating a space where environment and economic sustainability intersect.
Using one of our solutions, our See & Spray™ technology, we battle herbicide resistance and optimize the overall use of chemicals. These innovations open up the possibility to manage crops at the plant-by-plant level. Whether a teammate’s focus is pixel-by-pixel or plant-by-plant, we believe that focusing on the small stuff leads to big gains.
We also believe farmers should get to keep their hard-earned money. From optimizing the amount of chemicals they need to purchase, automating time-intensive tasks, to capturing better data about their crop yield and efficiencies, we are relentless about making a difference for our customers.
We leverage the strengths of John Deere to guarantee that our innovations are improving as many farms as possible, and that our work has a lasting impact on our customers and our environment. And our work is all channeled through a brand our customers trust and love.
Our people are at the heart of what we do.
We are always asking hard questions, rapidly iterating, and getting our boots in the field to figure it out. We won’t give up until we’ve made a tangible and positive impact on agriculture.
Looking back
Beginnings
A vision for better farming
In 2011, two Stanford graduate students, Jorge (the former head of precision agriculture at Trimble) and Lee (a PhD student and roboticist), met while taking Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad course. They converged on a wild ambition to make farming more sustainable through robotics and computer vision. Together, they built and tested their idea in California’s Central Valley – proving the applicability of machine learning, computer vision, and robotics to the field of agriculture. With an idea, support from friends and family, and a grant from the NSF, Blue River Technology was born.
The First Smart Machine
Meet lettuce bot
The first smart machine-the lettuce bot-focused on lettuce thinning, a traditionally time-intensive and expensive task of eliminating unwanted lettuce seedlings. The lettuce bot automated this arduous process by taking images, identifying which plants to remove, spraying them, and verifying the accuracy and performance of the system, all in real time.
The Next Generation of Smart Machines
See & Spray™ Technology
See & Spray™ is the next generation of Blue River’s technology. See & Spray™ machines leverage deep learning to enable our machines to identify a greater variety of plant-both crops and weeds-with better accuracy, and then make crop management decisions on the spot. Custom nozzle designs enable plant-by-plant spray resolution, and powerful software powers faster and more agile crop protection. See & Spray™ is currently operating in weed control for major US crops.
Partnering with John Deere
In September 2017, Blue River was acquired by John Deere.
While remaining an independently-run subsidiary with entrepreneurial spirit, the partnership gives Blue River access and support from one of the world’s leaders in precision agriculture.
Expanding into the Future
Continuing to develop exciting new technologies.
Crop protection is just the beginning. With the support of John Deere, Blue River is continuing to expand and explore a plethora of innovative new developments to support and empower those linked to the land.