By Judith Sudilovsky, NoCamels -
Officially, Israeli-American company Bluewhite may be in the autonomous technology business, but its main mission is ensuring the future of the world’s food supply.
The company launched its data-driven autonomous (self-driving) tractor four years ago, and, according to Bluewhite Vice President for Production and Testing Amir Peleg, it has a significant role to play in feeding the global population.
“When you look at everything we are facing in agriculture today – we are talking about labor shortages, buying challenges and costs, operational costs—sustainability needs to be accelerated so that around all that we can have enough food to feed the [growing] population,” Peleg tells NoCamels.
“It is a challenge. I think we are already contributing to the solution and we’re going to be a very big and important player in this game. I want to solve this issue.”
Bluewhite’s flagship product, the Pathfinder, offers a seamless transition to autonomous farming, retrofitting existing ordinary tractors with state-of-the-art technology and transforming them into smart, efficient machines.
Coupled with the Compass, a proprietary comprehensive software application, growers gain real-time insights and control over their fleet monitoring operations, optimizing routes and making data-driven decisions all from the palm of their hand – boosting productivity and minimizing downtime.
This combined technology offers up to an 85-percent saving for the grower by reducing operational and labor expenses while increasing yield, says Peleg.
Importantly, he points out, the technology does not take jobs away from workers, because the labor shortage in this area has been a worldwide issue for some 15 years now.
Directed by a worker using the Compass software, the Pathfinder can perform the five or six different jobs – such as spraying and mowing – that constitute 80 to 95 percent of the work required by the growers, Peleg explains.
“But we are doing much more than that,” he states.
Bluewhite currently has 100 operational Pathfinders in the field, and has been working operationally for almost the last four years in California’s Central Valley area with a pioneering group of 20 leading permanent crop farmers.
Permanent row crops don’t need to be cut down during the harvest and replanted at the beginning of every growing season, and include citrus, vineyards and berries, as well as hops for brewing beer.
And as far as Bluewhite is aware, it is the only company in the world that is currently operational with paying customers who are using autonomous tractors.
The startup was founded in 2017 by veterans of the Israel Air Force and the world of autonomous technology. Today, Bluewhite has gone global, with US-based headquarters in Fresno, California and backing from leading venture capital funders.
Initially, the Bluewhite founders began investigating the urban autonomous mobility field, but soon understood that it would take another 20 or 30 years until city self-driving technology was fully implementable, says Peleg.
The company quickly realized the potential of applying its expertise to farming, where it could have a quick and meaningful impact, in particular when it comes to global food security.
“We found that agriculture was the perfect venue to take our knowledge and experience,” Peleg says.
“We understood part of the issues and problems and challenges [facing] growers around the world,” he says. “We understood that our solution can bring great value for them.”
These changes in agriculture have become a big challenge for growers and a real opportunity for companies that can bring the technical solutions, says Peleg. Indeed, the global market for autonomous tractors is due to hit $11.5 billion by 2030.
In January, Bluewhite announced that it had secured $39 million in Series C financing led by Insight Partners, with participation from new investors Alumni Ventures and LIP Ventures, among others. Existing investors Entrée Capital, Jesselson, and Peregrine Ventures also participated.
The funds will be used to further scale its autonomous tractor and farming solutions, and expand into new markets worldwide based on its successful track record, it said.
According to Peleg, scalability, safety and sustainability lies at the core of the innovation.
The autonomous technology is flexible, he says, helping with labor shortages issues affecting farmers worldwide, the growing concerns for safety issues and lessening human contact with chemicals, and increased production rates.
“We’re doing retrofits for existing tractors so we don’t need to wait for new tractors. We don’t need farmers to pay a lot of money. We just take whatever [equipment] they have, and make it a user-friendly customer robot. You allow the grower to increase his productivity very quickly and reduce his costs, so they see a return on their investment really, really fast,” Peleg explains.
Even the original equipment manufacturers are telling growers that there is no way back from the autonomous world, he states.
Indeed, today Bluewhite works with most of the large original equipment manufacturers (known as OEMS) including CNH Industrial, training dealers to install their after-market retrofit kits, transforming a regular tractor into an autonomous vehicle.
To date, Bluewhite has enabled autonomous farming across 150,000 acres of farmland in the US alone, and has executed more than 50,000 operational hours, Peleg explains.
“We are seeing customers operating the farm alone without us, or just with one person. So it’s really going back to the zero-touch base, where we don’t need to be around anymore,” he says.
“Our solution combines real agriculture with the highest level of technology. It shows that you can really combine them with something not super sophisticated; though the capabilities are super-sophisticated, operating it is not.”
After the tractor has been retrofitted with its kit, Bluewhite provides support but the grower is quickly able to learn how to operate it alone.
Peleg also credits the farmers they worked for helping the company to implement their autonomous technology swiftly and efficiently.
“You have to start with the right customers and California farmers and growers are one of the toughest in the world,” he says, adding that they don’t hesitate to speak their mind and give input about their needs and what works and what doesn’t work.
“We have been working with colleagues in the field on the farm for a long time and we know their requirements, their demands, their problems, and their challenges,” Peleg says.
“We’re not developing our product only in the lab,” he says. “We went to work with customers. The most experienced farmers always wanted to work with us… they understand the future.”
One especially optimistic—and unexpected—outcome of the cooperative efforts has been that now farmers’ sons and daughters have begun to show interest in remaining in agriculture.
“They started talking about the tech or the startups, and are seeing that their parents are building 21st century autonomous farms—suddenly you have robots in your backyard and you’re becoming something very high-tech. So, the next generation, which ran away from agriculture, is talking about doing it together,” Peleg says.
“It’s a new way of talking about it.”
