Carbon Robotics has introduced Carbon AutoTractor, a tractor autonomy system designed to improve efficiency and reduce labor needs. Powered by Carbon AI, the system can be installed on existing tractors and is remotely monitored by Carbon Robotics operators, who provide real-time oversight to ensure smooth operation.

Developed with input from farmers, Carbon AutoTractor aims to address key barriers to autonomous tractor adoption, such as frequent stoppages, complex supervision, and systems that struggle with continuous operation.

“Too often, autonomy in agriculture has been overpromised and underdelivered,” said Paul Mikesell, CEO and founder of Carbon Robotics. “We built Carbon AutoTractor to change that — by working closely with farmers every step of the way to design a solution rooted in simplicity, reliability, and the realities of modern farm operations. This is autonomy shaped by real-world experience, not just another tech experiment.”

The system includes the Carbon Autonomy Kit and the Remote Operations Control Center. Unlike some autonomy solutions, Carbon AutoTractor is continuously monitored, allowing operators to intervene when obstacles arise, such as debris, wildlife, or irrigation equipment. This reduces stoppages and keeps work moving.

The Carbon Autonomy Kit is initially compatible with John Deere 6R and 8R Series tractors, with installation completed in less than 24 hours and no permanent modifications required. Tractors can switch between autonomous and manual operation as needed.

The system integrates with Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeeder, adjusting speed based on weed type, size, and density, improving coverage by up to 20 percent compared to manual operation.

Carbon AutoTractor also performs ground preparation tasks, including tilling, plowing, cultivating, and mowing, reducing the need for an in-cab driver. Multiple safety features, including GPS, cameras, sensors, and emergency stop mechanisms, provide additional security.

With real-time oversight, AI-driven decision-making, and a flexible pay-per-hour model, Carbon AutoTractor offers a practical approach to autonomy in farming.

Cow size has been on the rise for decades. Cows today weigh 1.4 times as much as their predecessors in 1980. In fact, cow weight is rising 100 pounds every 10 years.

Why has this occurred?

“Producers get paid for pounds, so ‘growth-bulls’ are selected, and the biggest heifers are retained,” said Ron Scott, Ph.D., cattle nutritionist with Purina Animal Nutrition.

This has achieved positive outcomes as producers aim to maximize profit by increasing pounds of production and selling heavier calves each year. While this breeding and management strategy has shown its merits, on the output side of the equation, larger cows aren’t always as profitable as you might think.

“Larger cow size can come with a larger price tag when you factor in higher inputs and reduced efficiency in pounds weaned,” said Scott. “To maximize profit potential, finding the middle ground between the cost of raising larger calves and their value at sale time can be important.”

Here are three tips to help you find the optimal cow size for your operation and manage it to improve efficiency:

1. Consider both inputs and outputs

It’s important to account for all profitability aspects when evaluating the right cow size for your operation.

On the input side, larger cows eat more than smaller cows, resulting in higher costs for feed and forage. The good news is that cows get slightly more efficient per pound as they grow. A 1,500-pound cow is 50 percent larger in weight, but her energy requirements are only approximately 36 percent greater than those of a 1,000-pound cow.

“However, the accuracy of this, in practicality, is debatable because of the ‘boss-cow’ effect,” said Scott. “Those bigger cows are the dominant cows, and they always will be first on the pecking order for feed resources. In other words, they take more than they need and that ‘extra’ is taken away from the smaller cows.”

On the output side, you’re selling bigger calves and getting paid for their increased weight. However, it might cost more to raise those calves. With larger calves, you must respond to their nutritional needs, ensuring they can keep up and continue gaining weight.

“Another consideration is that while cow size has been increasing, the percentage of weaning weight for calves hasn’t equally adjusted its ratio to make up for the larger size,” says Scott.

Data from North Dakota State University shows that a 1,000-pound cow weans 48.5 percent of her body weight compared to 43.6% for a 1,400-pound cow. Essentially, calves born from larger cows aren’t as efficient as calves born from smaller cows.

“Getting a complete picture of inputs and outputs can help you find the sweet spot when it comes to cow size for your operation to maximize profits,” said Scott.

2. Maximize forage resources

While cows have become larger, stocking rates have not kept up with genetic gain in cow size. Many producers are running the same number of cows on the same amount of acres as they always have.

“Overstocking can be problematic because cows may not get the nutrients they need from forage,” said Scott. “Traditional stocking rates are based on a 1,000-pound mature cow size, yet many cows surpass that threshold today.”

Consider this: A 1,500-pound cow is 1.5 times larger than a 1,000-pound cow. This means the larger cow needs about 1.5 times more nutrients than the smaller cow. To meet her forage needs, you would need to increase your stocking rates by 1.5 times.

“Adjusting stocking rates can ensure cows aren’t short-changed on nutrients and that pasture resources are used more efficiently,” said Scott. “Since most producers can’t easily weigh their cows, it can be challenging to know how much to increase the stocking rates for your specific operation.”

Consider investing in a digital or portable scale; this year is a great time to reinvest in your facilities with the added profits from the bullish cattle market. If an on-farm scale isn’t in the cards, consider weighing your herd on the trailer at a local cooperative when hauling your cows to pasture or evaluating cull cow weight using the weights listed on the sale bill.

3. Avoid nutrition gaps

While increasing stocking rates can help support nutritional needs, we can’t expect cows to get by on forages alone. Across the industry, particularly on the cow side, producers run the risk of not optimizing their profit potential by not fully meeting the nutritional needs of larger-sized cattle.

“Bigger cows have more significant nutritional requirements,” said Scott. “Meeting their increased nutritional needs can have cascading effects that could lead to improved profitability.”

Cows managed for optimal body condition scores at calving have been shown to rebreed with 88 percent or greater conception rates. And, by providing adequate nutrition to cows during each stage of gestation, you can better support the calf’s birth and weaning weight, immune function, finishing growth, and value to the herd if the calf is kept back. A nutrition program that meets your herd’s requirements helps ensure your genetic investment can be fully maximized, regardless of your average cow size.

“Free-choice tub, block or liquid supplements can help you more efficiently meet any nutrient gaps cows might face,” said Scott. “Monitoring intakes can also help you manage forages and stocking rates.”

If cows are eating more of the supplement than the target, dig in and ask some questions. Do I have enough forages? Is the forage quality high enough? Do I have an accurate pulse on my cows’ nutrition requirements? Free-choice products help give you a barometer for your nutrition program overall.

“Bigger cows can mean bigger costs, but also bigger profit potential,” said Scott. “Finding the right cow size for your operation and managing cows to help maximize efficiency may lead to greater profit potential.”

This piece was submitted by Purina.

Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides — could cut down the amount of runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.

A team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.

The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT Ph.D. alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash and Sreedath Panat, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.

A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.

Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. Research has found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year on conventional and organic pesticides.

Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent.

“Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says.

The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.

They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material.

In their study, the MIT researchers conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.

“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.

The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says.

In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.

“That way,” Varanasi said, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.”

Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.

“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” said Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”

Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.

In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash said. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”

“The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi said. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.

Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi said, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”

AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi said. “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.”