Raven Industries, Inc. has acquired Smart Ag Inc., a technology company that develops autonomous farming solutions for agriculture. Smart Ag will be integrated into Raven’s business and technology portfolio to create autonomous solutions for the precision ag market.

“The acquisition of Smart Ag is part of a bold, company-wide strategy for Raven,” said Dan Rykhus, Raven Industries President and CEO. “It is a key investment in Raven Autonomy, one of our two strategic growth platforms. Autonomy in agriculture is the future of farming, and this acquisition, coupled with our existing precision agriculture solutions, solidifies our position as a technology leader within this market.”

Smart Ag, headquartered in Ames, Ia., was founded in 2015 to solve the labor crisis in production agriculture. Smart Ag offers aftermarket retrofit kits to automate farm equipment as well as a platform to connect, manage and safely operate autonomous agricultural machinery. In addition to its proprietary technology, Smart Ag brings an established dealer network and a skilled development team to Raven.

“Raven’s experience in machine and application control is a perfect complement to the autonomous machine control developed by Smart Ag,” said Brian Meyer, Division Vice President of Raven Applied Technology. “Together, the expertise of both companies will allow for more operations to be performed in-field — with a significant increase in both performance and outputs. By automating existing machine platforms and implements, driverless machines have great potential to complement the work of manned machine operations in the field.”

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