FoA 284: Autonomous Sprayers with Gary Thompson of GUSS

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">See GUSS in action: <a href= "https://gussag.com/">https://gussag.com/</a></span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Almond Journey Podcast: <a href= "https://www.almonds.com/almond-industry/industry-news?field_topic_target_id=4267&year=all"> https://www.almonds.com/almond-industry/industry-news </a></span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have on the show today another great example of this in GUSS Automation. GUSS stands for Global Unmanned Spray System, and joining me for today’s episode is COO Gary Thompson. As the name implies, GUSS sells a fully autonomous sprayer for use in orchards and vineyards. Which is really interesting, because there is no piece of equipment that goes through these operations more than a sprayer does, so the savings and efficiencies here are compelling. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gary is going to share their interesting story of how this technology was developed out of their traditional custom spraying business, how they’ve grown without outside capital to start selling these machines, the value and benefits of these machines for farmers and other custom sprayers, and what these capabilities means for the future of agriculture. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">GUSS came up on another podcast that I host called the</span> <em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Almond Journey</span></em> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">podcast. For any of you who are interested in almonds as a crop, I highly recommend subscribing to that one as well. It’s a little shorter than this one with a different feel and it’s of course focused specifically on almonds. I was talking to a grower on the podcast about his low dust harvest equipment, but he made the point of talking about how happy he was with his purchase of some GUSS sprayers. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gary Thompson from GUSS grew up on a dairy farm in Arizona and went to Cal Poly where he met a lot of people in the central valley. It was there tha