Drip irrigation may have been around in one form or another since the Chinese wrote about it in the first century, but the system was made viable for modern agriculture by advances in Israel in the 1950s and 60s. Now, half a century later, the emphasis is on high-tech applications for water management and extraction. Two examples are CropX, a start-up that uses sensors to optimize irrigation, and Prospera, an artificial intelligence software company that combines the use of field cameras and machine learning for farm production management. Then there are completely new types of agriculture technology tools exemplified by Taranis, an information gathering and data analysis platform for farmers that can be used on a cell phone or tablet.

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