When you think about Silicon Valley, you probably don’t think of companies that specialize in farming equipment. But there’s one startup by the name of Blue River Technology that’s making waves in Silicon Valley with their special robotic farming machines. The robots they develop help farmers manage their fields more efficiently, combining computer vision and sophisticated machine learning algorithms to spray pesticides selectively. The old-school approach is to drench an entire field with weed-killing chemicals, but these machines can zero in on just the crops that need pesticides, cutting down on overall chemical usage. How it works is the machines are hooked up to tractors and are used to scan entire fields, only spraying the appropriate targets. As a result, farmers save money while also sparing the planet of unneeded chemicals.