Kubota Corporation, Osaka, Japan, through its North American subsidiary, Kubota North America Corporation, 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 (AI) to growers across seven countries and three continents. Today Bloomfield offers services to wine grape, table grape, juice grape, blueberry, and raspberry growers in the U.S., Mexico, Chile, Peru and France, and will expand to further specialty crops and countries in the coming months.

“The Bloomfield vision from our founding was to provide continuous plant-level knowledge to every specialty crop farmer around the world. This acquisition brings that vision forward at a scale and speed we could not have imagined,” said Mark DeSantis, president and CEO of Bloomfield Robotics. “Fortunately, we’ve been working closely together for over two years, so we have a running start at achieving this vision.”

Bloomfield’s cameras are the foundation for a new Software as a Service (SaaS) that provides plant-level health and performance assessments for growers. Bloomfield’s purpose-built cameras are easily 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 colour, 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 labour costs and increased asset utilization.

M. Brett McMickell, chief technology officer for Kubota North America, said: “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.”