Blue River VP explains how tech can make farming more sustainable and efficient

Blue River Technology (a subsidiary of John Deere) VP, Autonomy & New Ventures Willy Pell speaks with tech editor Dan Howley about farming tech, sustainable agriculture, and how John Deere is looking to improve farming efficiency at the CES 2023 conference.

Video Transcript

- Well, it was a big week for tech and Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley got a front row seat at CES in Las Vegas. Now he had a chance to speak with Willie Pell, Blue River technology VP of Autonomy and New Ventures. He's in on the latest innovations, delivering products that enable farmers to work efficiently, sustainably, and profitably. Take a listen.

WILLY PELL: The Big Machine you see here is see and spray. So what this is is an agricultural sprayer that is equipped with cameras and computers, and what you can do is you drive this machine over your crop, and it can detect the crop, and detect the weeds with the cameras, and in real time compute what's what, and spray only the weeds.

- So it's only hitting what it should-- what it needs to and not what it shouldn't.

WILLY PELL: Correct. So the traditional way that you would control weeds in farming is you get a genetically modified seed, and then you spray the entire field.

- Right.

WILLY PELL: And so we're saving farmers lots and lots of money, like 70% of their herbicide bill, by only spraying the weeds. And it's just much better for the environment. So.

- I know that you have this-- we can't obviously see it right now, but it's the exact shot. What does that do exactly?

WILLY PELL: OK, so that's a planting technology. And so what that's doing is, as the seed goes in the ground, it gives it this tiny little shot of espresso of fertilizer, very small amount, but very powerful. So usually the way people apply fertilizer in planting is they'll just spray everything, right? You fertilize all the ground in between seeds.

- Hit it all.

WILLY PELL: Which isn't actually valuable, right? All that nitrogen ends up running off into the rivers, and so we love these areas where we could save farmers money and make farming easier and more sustainable as a business, but also environmentally as well. So yeah, so both of those things fit that really well.