Advanced Farm Technologies, Inc., developers of robotic technology for farmers, has completed a series B investment round raising $25 million to support the company’s growth in strawberry harvesting and the adaptation of its technology to apple harvesting. The Series B funding round was led by Catapult Ventures and included all the Series A investors: Kubota Corporation, Yamaha Motor Corporation and Impact Ventures.

Corteva Agriscience is using a Spot robot from Boston Dynamics to ‘walk’ between rows of corn, sunflowers and more. The robot automates sensing and inspection, and it has potential applications in field testing of both new seed and crop protection solutions with its ability to collect copious amounts of data, support the application of new crop protection discovery molecules and inspect operations.

The first Raven Industries OMNiPOWER autonomous farming machine to be sold in the U.S. went to Frenchman Valley Coop, based in Imperial, Neb. The coop's vice president of agronomy took possession of the Raven OMNiPOWER automated machine Sept. 16 at Husker Harvest Days in Grand Island, Neb. 

U.S. Senators Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), members of the Senate Agriculture committee, introduced the Precision Agriculture Loan (PAL) Act on Sept. 15. The bipartisan legislation would create a program within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to provide loan financing to farmers and ranchers interested in purchasing precision agriculture equipment.