Agricultural technology giant Fieldin acquires Midnight Robotics

Two agri-tech giants have joined forces to bring farmers the benefits of new autonomous tractor technology that converts conventional tractors to automated operation and maximizes the efficiency of farm businesses.

California-based Fieldin, which claims to be the world’s largest intelligent farm operations management company for high-value crops, has just announced it has acquired Midnight Robotics, a company specializing in agricultural autonomous driving.

The acquisition will create the world’s first combination of a sensor-based agricultural operations platform and autonomous driving technologies that will enable farmers to take control of their farms on a day-to-day basis.

The technology can help farmers address labor shortages and other farming issues.Fieldin is already deploying the combined autonomous farming platform on major California farms and plans additional end-to-end deployments in the coming months.

The company says the addition of Midnight Robotics’ deep robotics and autonomous driving technology will enable an all-in-one solution that maximizes accuracy and productivity on the farm.

The platform collects agricultural data and turns it into actionable insights, and now offers driverless tractors and other machines with driverless decision-making and autonomous execution from the same dashboard.

Installing these new autonomous capabilities takes less than a day, Fieldin will arrive on the farm and equip tractors and other farm machinery with LiDAR-based autonomy kits that feed data back to the platform in real time.

Boaz Bachar, CEO and co-founder of Fieldin, said, “Many people think autonomous tractors are some magical solution, but ultimately they are just machines.”

“Autonomous farming can only be as good as the farm management data, and that’s why this acquisition is driving the autonomous farming revolution.

“Over the past eight years, we have digitized hundreds of farms and more than 10,000 tractors and farm implements, more than anyone else in the high-value crop world, and have collected invaluable data that provides insights into best practices in farm management.

“With the acquisition of Midnight Robotics, we’re helping farmers close the loop from insights to autonomous action, so they know exactly what they need to do and execute it autonomously, all through the same platform,” he said.

Fieldin has since its launch offered an intelligent agriculture SaaS platform that leverages sensor-based data to help growers worldwide improve production, operational visibility and efficiency by remotely monitoring field operations and integrating seamlessly with existing technologies, equipment and personnel to provide complete visibility into daily operations.

The company claims to be the largest intelligent agricultural operations management company in the United States, with 30 percent of U.S. lettuce production and 20 percent of the world’s almond production running through their platform.

Founded by Innoviz veterans and autonomous driving experts Yonatan Horovitz and Edo Reshef, Midnight Robotics uses cutting-edge computer vision and artificial intelligence to develop autonomous agricultural driving technology that is a perfect complement to Fieldin’s platform.

The company’s core product is a retrofit kit that can convert any tractor to autonomous operation using advanced LiDAR sensing algorithms that enable a robust and reliable solution for autonomous operation and precise execution.

Horovitz, who joins Fieldin as CEO of Autonomy, and Reshef, who will now serve as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, will both co-found Fieldin.

Yonatan Horovitz said, “It’s not enough to have great agricultural data or great autonomous technology, because you need both to make autonomous farming a reality.

“What’s so powerful about this merger is the powerful combination of Fieldin’s unparalleled agricultural data collection – which includes more than 49 million hours of tractor driving – and our expertise in driverless technology.

“We’re excited to join forces with Fieldin because only together will we be able to help farmers reap the benefits of smart and autonomous farming today, not a decade from now,” he said.

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