Nobody likes weeding, but new technology is helping farmers around the world control weeds more efficiently and in a more environmentally friendly way.
Deanna Kovar of US agricultural machinery giant John Deere says the company’s new tractor-pulled weed sprayer can reduce herbicide use by two-thirds.
Called See & Spray Ultimate, the system looks like a typical sprayer, with two long arms or “booms” extending out either side of the tractor and spray nozzles dotted on the underside of each.
What makes this syringe a far more high-tech product is that it comes with 36 cameras. These constantly scan the plants in front of them and immediately identify what is a crop and what is a weed.
Controlled by an artificial intelligence (AI) software system, the connected sprinklers then only spray the herbicide on individual weeds instead of drenching the entire field.
“Our system captures 1.2 billion pixels per second, so it sees and processes a lot,” says Ms. Kovar, John Deere’s vice president of production and precision agriculture production systems.
To help the software identify the weeds, there are more than 300,000 images in a John Deere database.
The system currently works with three crops – corn, soybeans and cotton – and is only available in the US so far.
For farmers in other parts of the world, a number of competing companies, both large and small, have developed similar intelligent weed control technologies. These include German company Bosch BASF Smart Farming, whose camera-scanning weed killer is called Smart Spraying Solution.
“The biggest challenge in agriculture is how weeds compete with crops for space, nutrients and water,” says Nadav Bocher, CEO and co-founder of Israeli company Greeneye Technology, another manufacturer of AI-assisted precision weed control systems.
His comments echo a 2021 study that said the annual financial impact of weeding on just one specific crop – winter wheat in the US and Canada – amounts to $2.2bn (£1.8bn) could amount.
“It’s hard to imagine the catastrophic damage agriculture has caused over the past few decades [due to excessive use of herbicide]says Mr. Bocher, who claims that Greeneye’s system can reduce usage by 80%.
“With such high levels of soil pollution occurring for no reason, it’s on us as consumers and it’s damaging to the entire ecosystem.”
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Mr. Bocher adds that while such high-tech weed control systems are expensive, costing Greeneye’s around $250,000, a large farm could see annual savings of up to $120,000 due to lower herbicide costs and higher crop yields.
“AI is such a precipitous change in the evolution of agriculture, it’s like going from oxen to tractors,” says Daniel McCann, who runs a company that is also infusing AI technology into a spraying solution for farmers. But with a twist in this case — his company Precision AI uses drones to fly over fields in the US Midwest to control weeds.
Based in Regina, Saskatchewan in Canada, Precision AI fed its database with more than two billion images. Mr McCann says this large number was necessary because “the same crop can look very different when planted in, for example, sandy soil compared to soil that gets a lot of rain and sun”.
The precision spray drones flying about 10 feet above the ground can be reassuring, McCann says. “We now live in a world where the market is becoming more careful about what’s in their food and demanding fewer chemicals for their fruit and veg and everything else.”
But whatever the advanced spraying method, farmers still face an uphill battle against weeds. “Some weeds evolve to look more like the crop, and they can be harder to find,” says Michael Gore, a professor in the SIPS Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University.
“Biology often wins in the end, but I like how companies come out with these tools that are constantly evolving.”
Given the high cost of these new weed control technologies, some experts would like farmers to get financial support from their governments so they can afford to buy them.
“There is a need for substantial financial subsidies that could help farmers overcome the initial lack of cost-effectiveness of digital technologies,” says Prof. Mihalis Kritikos, Policy Analyst at the European Parliament and an expert on the legal and ethical aspects of new and emerging technologies.
A weeding innovation that moves away from spraying herbicides altogether, instead uses powerful thermal lasers that zap weeds once identified by AI-enabled cameras.
Called the LaserWeeder, it was developed by Seattle-based Carbon Robotics, which claims it can eliminate up to 100,000 weeds an hour when pulled by a tractor.
The lasers destroy weeds instantly, and the burned remains are incorporated back into the soil, explains Paul Mikesell, Carbon Robotics chief executive.
So far, the system has been used on potato, onion and garlic fields in US states such as California, Washington and Idaho.
Mr. Mikesell adds that the first units sold out when it was released last year and more are now being made for the US and Canadian markets. The expansion to Europe should continue.
Laser weed control allows the farmer to avoid the dreaded “spray drift” that can occur when spraying herbicides, even when targeting is as accurate as possible. “If you spray something outside, it’s always going to drift off in some way,” says Mikesell.
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