Fabian A. Schmidt

Autonomous farming at @reservoirfarms in Salinas. When I got here joined a bunch of farmers from Florida who were visiting. But during the talks @bonsairobotics caught my attention. One of the first to use world models to drive autonomous farm equipment. Here's their CEO, Tyler Niday, talking to me about what's going on in farming around the world. And of course we talk about world models. My favorite topic lately. They have robots farming in Australia and here in America in a variety of places. He ran autonomous tractors for @JohnDeere for years. Reservoir Farms is an incubator—think of it like Y Combinator or Founders Inc., but for people who are making autonomous, AI-driven tractors and other farm equipment. It's a remarkable place. Worth telling anyone in farming about. @bernsteind, who runs it, used to work at Google in high tech and got the bug to help startups hit the farming market. He has a fairly big plot of land to do all sorts of testing, demos, and development work here in Salinas, with about 40 acres of a variety of different crops. That is something you can't do in Silicon Valley anymore. It takes me back to my childhood when Silicon Valley used to be all farms. It was a lot of fun hanging out with the farmers. They'll be doing some events and hackathons down here. If you're from Silicon Valley, it's only an hour south, and I highly recommend coming down to see what's going on. The AI part of farming is very similar to building an autonomous car or truck, so the kinds of jobs are very similar. The market is just very different, and the kinds of things a robot needs to figure out are different. You might be picking apples or spraying crops. You don't have pedestrian traffic, maybe, but you have other kinds of things you need to train and model on to work around. Anyways, I had a beautiful day hanging out here.