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Ten Years Ago This Was Science Fiction': The Rise of Weedkilling Robots
Ten Years Ago This Was Science Fiction': The Rise of Weedkilling Robots
Please enjoy today’s Stay Curious from The Guardian, “Ten years ago this was science
fiction: the rise of weedkilling robots.”
Thank you.
A robot made by Carbon Robotics kills weeds on farmland using lasers. Photograph:
Carbon Robotics
Sat 14 Aug 2021 08.00 EDT
This field doesn’t belong to a dystopian future but to Shay Myers, a third-
generation farmer whose TikTok posts about farming life often go viral.
He began using two robots last year to weed his 12-hectare (30-acre) crop. The
robots – which are nearly three metres long, weigh 4,300kg (9,500lb), and
resemble a small car – clamber slowly across a field, scanning beneath them
for weeds which they then target with laser bursts.
“For microseconds you watch these reddish color bursts. You see the weed, it
lights up as the laser hits, and it’s just gone,” said Myers. “Ten years ago this
was science fiction.” Other than engine sounds, the robots are almost silent
and each one can destroy 100,000 weeds an hour, according to Carbon
Robotics, the company that makes them.
https://youtu.be/QgCY-CYP6MU
Farmers are under increasing pressure to reduce their use of herbicides and
other chemicals, which can contaminate ground and surface water,
affect wildlife and non-target plants, and have been linked to increased cancer
risk. At the same time, they are battling a rise in herbicide-resistant weeds,
giving extra impetus to the search for new ways to kill weeds.
Five years ago there were almost no companies specializing in farm robots,
said Sébastien Boyer, the French-born head of San Francisco-based robot
weeding company FarmWise, but it’s now “a booming field”.
The global market for these agricultural robots – which can also be designed
to perform tasks such as seeding, harvesting and environmental monitoring –
is predicted to increase from $5.4bn in 2020 to more than $20bn by 2026.
“Things scale up very quickly in agriculture,” said Myers.
They’re not just the preserve of larger farms, said Elizabeth Sklar, an
engineering professor at King’s College London, “some of the smaller farms
are able to be more flexible with trying out new approaches”.
Farmwise robots are being used by farmers in California and Arizona. Photograph:
FarmWise
FarmWise found its first customers in California’s Salinas Valley, which grows
lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and strawberries and is known as “America’s
salad bowl”. Ten of the US’s 20 largest vegetable growers, in California and
Arizona, now use the company’s robot weeders, according to Boyer. “In the
beginning, they started working with us as an experiment, but now they are
heavily relying on us”.
Removing pests, such as aphids, thrips and lygus bugs, is a next step for
FarmWise. Robots can markedly reduce the use of fungicides and pesticides,
said Boyer, by applying them more precisely, using computer vision.
As well as concerns over farming chemicals, labor shortages also play a part in
robots’ advance into farmland. Farm labour can be “expensive, hard to come
by and dangerous” for people involved, said Myers. In a viral TikTok video in
April he said he could not hire workers to pick his asparagus crop because the
government had not granted him visas in time.
There are still big challenges to wider-scale adoption. One problem is working
in places where a battery recharge is not always readily available, which is a
reason some robots – including those made by Carbon Robotics and
FarmWise – use diesel for power, which itself produces harmful emissions and
pollution.
The robot farmers of the future “have got to be different than the machines
we’ve created in the past. You don’t want big, fossil fuel-guzzling machines;
you want smaller, renewable energy-using machines,” said David Rose,
professor of agricultural innovation at the University of Reading in the UK.
Some robots are already powered by renewable energy. UK-based Small Robot
Company’s spider-shaped weeding robot is powered by Tesla batteries. Danish
company FarmDroid’s machines and a herbicide-spraying robot made by
Switzerland’s Ecorobotix are both solar powered.
With batteries rapidly becoming lighter and gaining capacity, farm robots
could soon be electrified, said Paul Mikesell, head of Carbon Robotics. This
must be accompanied by charging infrastructure on farms, said Rose. “I don’t
think we’re far away at all,” he added.
In the meantime, using fewer herbicides may be worth some diesel use, said
Richard Smith, a weed science farm adviser from University of California at
Davis. “In comparison to all the other tractor work that is done on intensive
vegetable production fields, the amount used for the auto-weeders is a small
percent,” he said.
Another challenge is cost. These robots are still expensive, though broader
adoption is likely to bring costs down. Carbon Robotics’s robot costs roughly
the same as a mid-size tractor – in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (it
won’t confirm exact costs) – though the company says it is also exploring
leasing possibilities.
FarmWise sells robots’ weeding labor, rather than the robots themselves,
charging roughly $200 an acre. Selling a weeding service instead of selling
robots requires less upfront investment from farmers, said Boyer, and helped
get the robotics business off the ground.
“These service models should reduce the cost barrier for most farmers, and
they do not have to worry too much about the technical difficulties with these
robots,” Das said.
Covid has been a problem, too, impeding access to clients, investors
and semiconductors from Asia. The pandemic has “squeezed startups out of
the runway”, says Andra Keay, head of the non-profit Silicon Valley Robotics.
But, beyond weeding robots, Covid has also spurred interest in how robots can
shorten supply chains.
“Not a lot has changed in agriculture, especially in fresh produce, in the last 70
years,” said Brandon Alexander, the head of Iron Ox who grew up in a large
Texas farming family. “Robotic farming offers a chance for humanity to
address climate change before 2050,” he said.