Blue River Technology serves the agricultural industry with revolutionary computer-vision based robotics designed to unlock greater crop yield potential. We envision a future where farmers use robotics to individually care for each plant in their fields. Our technology can dramatically reduce the amount of chemicals used in agriculture as well as drive significant labor efficiencies, while capturing valuable plant-by-plant data.
Our team of almost 50 people comes from diverse backgrounds in robotics, computer vision, agriculture, and business. We have designed and deployed 6 machines in commercial operation in the field to provide a per-acre lettuce-thinning service in Salinas, CA and Yuma, AZ, and are currently working on expanding these operations to weeding in a wider range of crops and geographies.
We receive support and investment from venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures, Pontifax AgTech, Data Collective, Monsanto Ventures and Syngenta Ventures. We also generate revenue by operating our current third-generation lettuce-thinning systems, which have set a new industry standard for precision and reliability.
We are looking for a highly skilled and energetic person to play a key role in improving and supporting our revolutionary robotic and vision-based systems for agriculture. You will be joining a world-class research and engineering team to provide critical skills in improving existing systems and pushing the boundaries of this technology. The role will be largely focused on doing field research and trialing work to support:
- Further development of thinning machines and our agricultural services business
- Development of the forthcoming weeding machines
- Investigation of opportunities to spray beneficial materials and crop protectants on kept plants
This position is based at our Salinas operations headquarters and will require significant seasonal travel to lettuce farming regions in San Joaquin Valley and Yuma/Imperial. The Agronomist will report to the General Manager, and will have significant interaction with Operations Manager, Technical Managers, Product Managers, and VP Business Development. This position will be provided a company vehicle for business use.
- BSc Agronomy or related degree
- QAL and PCA license in CA (required)
- Experience in lettuce production
- Experience in weed control in specialty crops
- Experience in creating and conducting field trials
- PCA license in AZ
- CCA license
- Management experience overseeing one or more direct reports
- Experience in developing and implementing quality processes
- Thinning and weeding commercial work verification and quality issues response
- Maintain regular verification of thinning and weeding work to ensure quality
- Lead response to quality issues by being “boots on the ground”
- Experimentation to verify optimal thinning settings: machine settings, plant spacing and size
- Design and run experiments to determine optimum spacing, machine settings, and plant size requirements for thinning
- Gather input and feedback from customers and machine operators
- Implement recommended settings into Quality Assurance processes
- Experimentation to support lettuce weed control
- Design and run experiments to verify the real-world performance of new weeding features:
- Experimentation with new herbicides
- Design and run experiments to evaluate new herbicides for thinning and weeding systems.
- Experimentation with crop beneficial materials
- Design and run experiments to evaluate beneficial materials (nutrients, plant protectants, etc.) for system.
- Train operations crew for safe handling of crop protection materials, chemicals, fertilizers, etc.
- Interface to customers PCAs
- Establish and maintain relationship with customers PCAs
- Understand their view of Blue River thinning and weeding work
- Understand the challenges that they have , and think of opportunities to employ Blue River Technology to solve problems; propose ideas to Blue River product managers
