For thousands of years, farming involved making judgments about water, fertilizers or new seeds with the human eye. Today farmers are using machine-learning tools to boost their yields and help their bottom line.

One London-based agtech startup has spent the past two years building software that can scan a field and build a map for tractors and other farm machinery to follow, helping bring farming costs down.

Hummingbird Technologies, which has a staff of 40 and is on course to book $1 million in revenue for 2018, hires drone pilots to make detailed aerial photos of fields.

These photos can, depending on the quality of the camera, show detail down to a single blade of grass. The images are analyzed by Hummingbird's software, which counts the plants in a field, measures each one’s height and “canopy” width, or scans the plants for early signs of disease.

Its software uses computer vision, a form of machine learning, to identify acres of weeds or chlorophyll concentrations more quickly than a single human could.


Source and more:
When Drones Talk To Tractors: How Farmers Are Using AI To Cut Costs http://www.sanwomi.com/2018/10/when-drones-talk-to-tractors-how.html