Agricultural Robots – Clean Food Without Pesticides – CleanTechnica

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Weeds are the bane of all farmers. They compete with crops for soil moisture and nutrients and can block out sunlight needed for crop growth, reducing yields. Over the last five decades, chemical eradication has become the method of choice for controlling weeds. It is common for farmers to spray or otherwise apply several weed-killing chemicals to their fields in a single season. Now agricultural robots that remove weeds are becoming more common.

Nature has a way of disrupting the plans of farmers to use less pesticides. Just as many of the diseases that afflict humans have become resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics because of overuse, weeds have also developed a tolerance for weed-killers like glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. That means farmers have to apply more and more of the stuff and pay more and more money for it, cutting into their profits.

The scientific community has found that exposure to the toxic substances in weed killers can cause disease. In addition to glyphosate’s link to cancer, the weed-killing chemical paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease. Another common farm herbicide, atrazine, can be harmful to reproductive health and is linked to several other health problems. Weed-killing chemicals have also been found to be harmful to the environment, with negative impacts on soil health and on pollinators and other important species.

Greenfield Robotics

Several companies are bringing agricultural robots to market that control weeds mechanically, the way farmers used to do with hundreds of hours of backbreaking labor. One of them is Greenfield Robotics, started by Clint Brauer, a former California-based tech executive who moved back to his family farm in central Kansas after his father developed Parkinson’s disease. He sees the robots as critical tools to help farmers reduce their reliance on chemicals and be more protective of their health and the environment.

His battery-powered agricultural robots are 4 feet (1.2 meters) long and 2 feet (0.6 meters) wide. Brauer builds and programs them in a shed behind an old farmhouse where his grandmother once lived. Twenty farmers are signed up for the robotic services this season, and the company hopes to weed 5,000 acres (2,023 hectares) this year. “The answer is here,” he told The Guardian. “This solves a lot of problems for farmers.”

Financial backing is flowing to companies making weed-killing agricultural robots from venture capital funds, private investors, and large food and agricultural companies eager to make bets on the bots as a means to promote more sustainable food production. The investment arm of Chipotle Mexican Grill has invested in Greenfield Robotics. Christian Gammill, who leads Chipotle’s venture fund, said Greenfield’s work was “important and impactful.” Greenfield has raised about $12 million in capital, and is seeking more, according to Brauer.

Aigen Robotics

In North Dakota, Aigen Robotics has raised $19 million to date. Its compact agricultural robots are powered by solar panels fixed to the top of each machine and are designed to work autonomously, sleeping and waking up on farm fields. Aigen co-founder and CEO Kenny Lee previously worked in cybersecurity. His partner is Richard Wurden, who worked in the electric vehicle industry. Together they are on a “personal mission” to reduce herbicide use in farming. Lee is a survivor of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a disease the International Agency for Research on Cancer has found can be caused by glyphosate based weedkillers, such as Roundup. The company is deploying 50 agricultural robots this summer in sugar beet fields in the Midwest, and is aiming to grow its fleet to 500 for use with an expanded array of crops.

Regenerative Agriculture As An Alternative To Herbicides

Farmers are not usually early adopters of new technologies. Part of their reluctance is based on the fact that their farms and all their equipment is mortgaged. With modern tractors costing half a million dollars or more, they can’t afford to take a flyer on some new idea that may endanger their harvests. Many farmers and academic experts are skeptical that agricultural robots can make a substantial difference. They say that there is simply too much farmland and too many diverse needs to be addressed by robots that are costly to make and use. The better path, many say, is for farmers to work with nature, rather than against it.

The model they recommend is called regenerative agriculture, which uses a variety of strategies to improve soil health — things like limiting pesticides, rotating crops, planting crops that provide ground cover to suppress weeds, and avoiding disturbing the soil. That’s the better path, they say. “I think the robots can be a useful tool as part of an integrated weed approach, but using as a single tool … is probably not going to work that well,” Adam Davis, a professor and head of the University of Illinois department of crop science, told The Guardian.

Wisconsin farmer Ryan Erisman agreed. “The robot weeders represent another round in the arms race against nature,” he said. “So many of our agricultural tools are really weapons that we use against perceived threats. When we keep running into the same problem year after year or season after season, it’s not our tools, our techniques, or our technology that needs reworking. It is our failure to understand the system we are working in and our relationship to it.”

Despite the naysayers, Kansas farmer Torrey Ball is eagerly awaiting his turn for Greenfield’s robotic fleet. Last year, the company’s robots weeded his sunflower fields. This month they will weed some of his soybean acreage. Ball is a longtime user of many of the leading weed-killing herbicides and knows first hand how expensive and how ineffective some products have become as weeds have developed resistance to the widely used chemicals, particularly glyphosate. He also knows of the research showing the risks to human health and he worries what the chemicals are doing to water quality.

He only runs the robots on a small portion of his 2,000-acre (809-hectare) farm for now, but hopes one day they may help him break free of chemical dependency on all his land. “If we can use less chemicals I’m all for that,” Ball said. “We’re going to try and leave the ground in better shape than what it was when we took it over, which is hopefully everybody’s goal.”

The Takeaway

Agricultural robots may not be the only answer to controlling weeds on farms. Surely it depends on which crops are being cultivated. When the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, a robot may not be very effective. Regenerative farming is pretty much the way farming used to be done before factory farms became the norm, which plant the same crops year after year after year. The main point is that continuing to pour chemicals on crops is a path to diminishing returns and saturating the land with toxic crud at the same time. Expect to hear more about agricultural robots in the years to come.