Vic Method, a Director with Fall Line Capital, became an added value resource to the FarmWise team last fall, working extensively with the FarmWise sales team to help potential customers experience the Vulcan. This involved demonstrating the Vulcan in the grower’s own fields under their unique conditions. The Vulcan is FarmWise’s next-generation intra-row weeder and precision cultivator. The Vulcan provides optimum weed removal day or night, regardless of weed pressure levels, or crop growth stages. This is all thanks to their industry-leading IPS (Image Plant System) image capture, their proprietary machine learning, and powerful processing capability. The Vulcan is very robust with a fully modular, component-based architecture, allowing for straightforward service and maintenance, translating to high uptime and great reliability for growers. Each Vulcan can be adjusted to various bed and row width structures from 80”-84” to 40”-42”, and can accommodate 1 to 6 rows at a time. The machine self-calibrates, and farmers can fine-tune the weeding precision from inside the cab with the English-Spanish system interface.
Vic and the FarmWise crew started their Vulcan demonstrations in the South-Central Valley of California last fall, moving to the winter lettuce region of the desert around Yuma, Arizona. In early March, they returned to the hotbed of lettuce production in Salinas, CA in preparation for the spring planting season. Despite a wetter winter than normal, they demoed the unit for a significant number of growers and industry people and are continuing to do so. They are visiting with many different growers at their specific operations to better understand their individual needs in automated weeding to reduce manual labor and improve their profitability. Some Vulcans have been sold because of this effort, and new orders are expected soon.
Fall Line Capital led FarmWise’s series B funding in April 2022.
