BOONE, Iowa – With a desire to provide more space to house and build their automated farm equipment company, officials at Salin 247, Inc., recently moved their operations to Iowa State University’s BioCentury Research Farm, just west of Ames in Boone.

Dave Krog, CEO and co-founder with his son, Ben, established the company in 2021. Dave said, “Our initial motivation and continuing motivation is to get big, heavy, expensive farm machinery off the field. We have a sustainability focus that includes taking better care of our soils.

“Part of this involves trying to help reduce soil compaction. Another side of it is helping growers reduce tillage. We also believe smaller, autonomous (automated) machines will bring down the cost of crop production, including lowering the cost of machinery.”

Formerly based near Ames, Salin 247 focuses on developing planters, cultivators and applicators that operate independently without needing a tractor to pull them through a field, he said.

“Our machines are electric, and our original plan was to use a renewable energy source – wind energy – to charge our batteries,” he said. “So, Salin is a play on sailing (i.e., wind power). We have since moved away from using wind power and are moving to using biodiesel fuel to power a diesel engine, which runs a generator that powers the many electric motors on our machines. The ‘247’ part is that the machines will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“We started out by self-funding the effort and have since raised some funds using a Simplified Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) agreement (a legal contract between a startup and an investor that allows the investor to purchase equity in the company at a future date),” he added.

Krog holds a bachelor’s in agronomy, and a master’s and doctoral degree in economics from Iowa State University. Ben is a mechanical engineer who holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Iowa. Saeed Arabi is the company’s software lead who holds a doctoral degree in intelligent infrastructure from Iowa State University.

When asked about choosing Iowa State University’s research farm for the company’s new location, Krog said, “We had an office and shop space in a facility on the west edge of Ames that worked out well for us for about three years. However, we were running out of room, so we contacted Matt Darr at Iowa State University (a professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering and the BioCentury Research Farm’s director) to see if he knew of some options for us.

“(Darr’s) Digital Ag group at Iowa State was ready to move from the BioCentury Research Farm to their new location at the Iowa State University Research Park, which freed up space at the BioCentury Research Farm for Salin 247,” he added. “Matt and Rob Hartmann (researcher administrator) at the BioCentury Research Farm have treated us great, and our new location is working out well for us.”

Darr said the work Salin 247 is doing fits right in with the research farm’s emphasis on innovative and sustainable research and the development of cutting-edge technologies.

“The BioCentury Research Farm has been a hub for public and private partnerships for over 15 years,” he said. “We are thrilled to welcome Salin 247 into our community, and know their work perfectly aligns with our spirit of discovery and innovation.”

Krog said the company’s automated machines are compact, compared to traditional farm equipment, especially given that a tractor is not needed for them to operate. “It’s amazing how different and unique each field is. We have to calibrate and fine-tune the equipment for each field.”

He said that includes mapping out fields ahead of time and noting any drainage intakes, terraces or other obstacles the equipment may encounter. The information is uploaded to the machine’s GPS before it is put in the field to begin work.

He said the next step will be installing cameras on the equipment that are connected remotely to a computer tablet, allowing farmers to see if parts of the machine have become dirty and need to be cleaned before resuming field work. Artificial intelligence could also monitor the camera feed and identify problems, he added.

He said more testing and fine-tuning must be done before the automated equipment becomes available for purchase. He added that the company will use their new space at the research farm to design and build docking stations for the equipment to be refilled with seed or spray, eliminating the need for a farmer to refill the machines.

When asked if any farmers have used Salin 247 on their fields and how they can most benefit from it, he said, “Over the past three years, we have been on about 50 farms in six states: Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee. We have also done demos in New England and Indiana. Most of what we have done so far on these farms has been on-farm trial work.

“We have had projects with the Iowa Soybean Association, Iowa State University, and a group in Memphis, Tenn., called AgLaunch,” he said.

He added, “The benefit to U.S. growers so far has been to get a glimpse of the future of crop production. We believe in a few years, nearly all crop production will be using autonomous machines for some, if not all, field operations.”