Kubota North America Ventures into Crop Monitoring Services by Acquiring Bloomfield Robotics
Kubota Corp., Osaka, Japan, through its North American subsidiary, Kubota North America Corp., has acquired Bloomfield Robotics Inc., a Pittsburgh-based company. Bloomfield provides a service that monitors the health and performance of specialty crops, one plant at a time, using advanced imaging and artificial intelligence to growers across seven countries and three continents.
“We are excited to announce the acquisition of Bloomfield Robotics, a natural evolution of our successful partnership through Kubota’s support of open innovation,” said M. Brett McMickell, chief technology officer for Kubota North America. “Combining AI-driven technology with our legacy quality products will enable Kubota to solve real issues facing agriculture. This acquisition is a key milestone for Kubota’s strategic vision to provide comprehensive smart agriculture solutions.”
Bloomfield’s cameras are the foundation for a new Software as a Service (SaaS) that provides plant-level health and performance assessments for growers of grapes (e.g., wine, table, and juice), blueberries, and other specialty crops. Bloomfield’s purpose-built cameras are mounted on tractors and other vehicles common to farming and allow for the capture of detailed plant-level, geo-located images of the entire farm. These images are then translated into crop data such as color, maturity, and size of the fruit using Bloomfield’s AI. The result is insights into harvest timing and yield, which enables meaningful operational efficiencies, better timed harvests, reduced labor costs, and increased asset utilization.
“The Bloomfield vision from our founding was to provide continuous plant-level knowledge to every specialty crop farmer around the world,” said Mark DeSantis, president and CEO of Bloomfield Robotics. “This acquisition brings that vision forward at a scale and speed we could not have imagined. Fortunately, we’ve been working closely together for over two years, so we have a running start at achieving this vision. We’re truly excited for what’s to come.”
The level of mechanization and automation in specialty crop farming, such as fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts, lags behind advancements incorporated in the cultivation of row crops. Innovative solutions to integrate data with automated systems, operational robotics, and other assets are needed. The specialty crop market overall has become a focal point of Kubota’s strategic attention and efforts to shape the future of agriculture.
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.