Fieldin, a leading smart farm operations company for high-value crops, has announced the acquisition of Midnight Robotics, a leader in agricultural autonomous driving. The acquisition creates a first-of-its-kind combination of a sensor-based operational farming platform with autonomous driving technologies to empower growers in the day-to-day management of their farms.
Fieldin is already deploying its combined autonomous farming platform in major farms in California and plans additional deployments of the end-to-end system in the coming months.
Commercial farms today face a wide range of challenges, including labor scarcity, water shortages and climate change and thus need to optimise operations and prioritise farming efficiency. Fieldin’s addition of Midnight Robotics’ deep robotic and autonomous driving technology enables an all-in-one solution to maximise accuracy and productivity on the farm.
The platform collects farming data and turns it into actionable insights and now also offers guided decision-making and autonomous execution via driverless tractors and other machinery from within the same dashboard. The onboarding of these new autonomous capabilities takes under a day, with Fieldin arriving at the farm and retrofitting tractors and other farming machinery with LiDAR-based autonomy kits that feed data back to the platform in real-time.
“Many people think that autonomous tractors are some magic solution, but at the end of the day, they’re just machinery—your autonomous farm can only be as good as your farm management data, and that’s why this acquisition is driving the autonomous farming revolution forward,” said Boaz Bachar, CEO of Fieldin. “Over the past eight years we’ve digitized hundreds of farms and over 10,000 tractors and pieces of farming equipment— more than anyone else in the high-value crop world— and amassed a trove of invaluable data that can offer insights into best practices in farm management. By acquiring Midnight Robotics, we’re helping farmers close the loop from insight to autonomous action, so they know exactly what they need to do and execute it autonomously, all through the same platform.”
Since launching, Fieldin has provided a smart farming SaaS platform that utilizes sensor-based data to help growers worldwide improve production, operational transparency, and efficiency by monitoring field activities remotely and seamlessly integrating with existing technologies, equipment, and personnel to provide full visibility into day-to-day operations. The company is the largest smart farm operations management company in the US, with 30% of US-based lettuce crops and 20% of the world’s almond crop run through their platform.
