Innovations for Weed Control
Advances in agricultural technology may result in products/devices/equipment that can be used to increase profits, decrease costs, improve production efficiency, and/or make compliance easier for crop producers. Below are several innovations that may become available for use by producers to accomplish one or several of these goals.
Greenfield Robotics has developed a system that uses robots to mechanically remove weeds from a crop. The goal of this system is to minimize or eliminate the use of chemicals for weed control. The robots use proprietary software and technology to cut weeds that are present between crop rows. They are monitored by a central operation center, and use a combination of sensors and GPS technology to navigate between rows without hitting the crop growing in the rows. The autonomous robots can weed between 30 and 100 acres per day.
UK-based Garford Farm Machinery and RootWave have jointly developed an eWeeding system that kills weeds with electricity [Garford-RootWave]. The system works by using a precision-guided toolbar to drag electrodes between crop rows to apply alternating-current electricity to a weed plant to kill it. The machine can be used repeatedly–thus its cost can be spread over time. Since it uses non-chemical weed control, producers will not have to worry about mitigation requirements where/when herbicides are applied, the availability of needed herbicides, or resistance issues that currently affect control of many problematic weeds with herbicides.
Several companies have developed/are developing robotic sprayers that can selectively apply herbicides to weeds. Several of these products are listed below.
• The Solix Robotic Sprayer from Solinftec is powered by onboard solar panels, and uses a suite of integrated sensors to scan plants as it passes through a field. If the onboard AI system determines that a plant is a weed, the autonomous sprayer will apply herbicide to it. According to the developer, the sprayer can manage up to 100 acres per day and can operate 24 hours a day with minimal soil compaction.
• The Sharpshooter Smart Sprayer from Verdant Robotics can operate day or night on any tractor capable of pulling at least 3000 lbs. The sprayer is fully customizable so the user can specify parameters such as number of rows and tank size using a tablet-based interface.
• The autonomous sprayer Herbicide GUSS from GUSSag uses a combination of GPS, LiDAR, sensors, and software to guide the sprayer across fields. The current GUSS sprayers are designed for orchard spraying, but it is likely that the technology will be transferred to robot sprayers that can be used for row crop spraying in the future [Click here to learn about current collaboration between John Deere and GUSS automation].
Midsouth soybean producers are encouraged to keep abreast of developments pertaining to AI and robotics products that can be used to increase production efficiency and/or reduce inputs to soybean fields.
Composed by Larry G. Heatherly, Sep. 2024, larryh91746@gmail.com