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AI-Enhanced Weed-Killing Robots Frighten Pesticide Industry (reuters.com)
Rick Schumann writes:
A Swiss company called ecoRobotix is betting the agricultural industry will be willing to welcome their solar-powered weed-killing autonomous robot, in an effort to reduce the use of herbicides by up to a factor of 20 and perhaps even eliminate the need for herbicide-resistant GMO crops entirely.
The 'see-and-spray' robot goes from plant to plant, visually differentiating the actual crops and weeds, and squirting the weeds selectively and precisely with weed killer, as opposed to the current technique of using large quantities of weed killer like Monsantos' Roundup to spray entire crops.
Weeds are already becoming resistant to such glyphosate-based herbicides after "more than 20 years of near-ubiquitous use," reports Reuters. (The head of one pesticide company's science division concedes that "That was probably a once-in-a-lifetime product.") But AI-based precision spraying "could mean established herbicides whose effect has worn off on some weeds could be used successfully in more potent, targeted doses."
Meanwhile, another Silicon Valley startup has built a machine using on-board cameras to distinguish weeds from crops -- and was recently acquired by the John Deere tractor company. Reuters calls these companies the "new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry."
The original submission asks: Should we welcome our weed-killing robotic overlords?
The 'see-and-spray' robot goes from plant to plant, visually differentiating the actual crops and weeds, and squirting the weeds selectively and precisely with weed killer, as opposed to the current technique of using large quantities of weed killer like Monsantos' Roundup to spray entire crops.
Weeds are already becoming resistant to such glyphosate-based herbicides after "more than 20 years of near-ubiquitous use," reports Reuters. (The head of one pesticide company's science division concedes that "That was probably a once-in-a-lifetime product.") But AI-based precision spraying "could mean established herbicides whose effect has worn off on some weeds could be used successfully in more potent, targeted doses."
Meanwhile, another Silicon Valley startup has built a machine using on-board cameras to distinguish weeds from crops -- and was recently acquired by the John Deere tractor company. Reuters calls these companies the "new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry."
The original submission asks: Should we welcome our weed-killing robotic overlords?
Seems like it wouldn't take much more mechanical engineering know how to pull them out by the roots. I have yet to hear of a weed that can resist being pulled out of the ground and tossed into the compost bin.
Some weeds break at the soil line and the roots regrow, you say? It's a robot, run it again in a month or two. Extra added bonus, this time you get all those young whippersnapper weeds that were but tis a seed last time the robot came by.
This is an awesome job for AI robots. Either:
1. It replaces hard-on-the-body manual labor (long hours bent over, sun & sunburn & skin cancer, etc) by using a robot to pull weeds.
2. It delivers targeted doses of herbicides, hopefully reducing the enormous amount of Glyphosate(*) currently used AND reducing Monstanto's ridiculous amount of control over the farm industry.
* - Over 90% of all glyphosate produced and used EVER has been in the past 20 years. 70% in just the last 10. Food today is NOT the same as it was in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Do you trust Monsanto to proactively limit the amount of Roundup you consume?
https://www.ecowatch.com/monsa...
Just apply very concentrated doses of fertilizer and other "good" soil chemicals - enough to poison the weeds when applied directly, but good for the crop when diluted by irrigation or rain.
weed killer != pesticide. Weed killer is designed to kill plants with a preference hopefully for weeds. Pesticide is designed to kill bugs.
Sorry, you're wrong. From dictionary.com:
pesticide
noun
a chemical preparation for destroying plant, fungal, or animal pests.
The word you wanted was insecticide.
Robotics can make sense in agriculture, but as every farmer will tell you, farming is really about economics: Getting good returns of investment on a weeding robot, given how relatively cheap pesticides are, is going to be tricky given regular year's crop prices.
The last time we had a boom in agricultural tech had nothing to do with the tech getting better, and a lot with a terrible drought in the midwest that made prices skyrocket. When corn pays $8 per bushel, instead of $3, suddenly everyone was willing to buy tech. Then prices drop again, nobody wants to keep buying, and many people that bought into the tech when they expected $8 forever just went bankrupt.
Eventually we'll have cheap enough robots that will also handle pests, and might even isolate or destroy diseased plants, lowering our chemical uses while still having great yields, but in agriculture, it's the economics that is stopping a tech boom, as aiming for the top of the technology chain, including the best seeds, is quite the gamble given what weather can do to your operation.
The article seems to suggest that the plan is to use current herbicides in greater concentrations to overcome resistance. But, surely the entire point of the current herbicides is that they fiendishly designed to be poisonous to weeds but not to crops. Once you have a gadget which only sprays the weeds, you can use a less specific chemical which just kills any plant it is sprayed on and which presumably the weeds haven't yet had a need to develop resistance to. It also seems to me that a weedkiller which kills any plant can attack much more fundamental aspects of plant biochemistry and therefore be harder to develop resistance to.
I already have weedkillers in my shed which basically say on the label "Kills all plants, only spray this on your weeds" and what they seem to be proposing is essentially the huge automated equivalent of me roaming my garden and carefully spraying any weeds I find.
This is called Vavilovian mimicry and is very, very well known. There are many weed species that have been selected to match the growth period, habit, and appearance of crop plants, and are thus propagated inadvertently by farming. They only need to mimic during the part of the their life cycle where they are subject to weeding, but some are near replicas are of the crop plant despite belonging to different genera.
I think robotic farming may make this a lot harder for the weed. If you have robot planter that exactly space the seeds, and robotic sprayers that can both recognize crops based on their appearance, but can also use their planting pattern for recognition, it could become a lot harder. Also the optical sensors could out perform the human eye. Narrow band filters might be very useful for recognizing the crop plant. In fact this might offer another genetic engineering tool. Add an unusual pigment or pigments that reflect specific wavelengths which the robot can detect with filters, but won't be found in any of the weed species. Essentially adding optical tagging.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
That's funny. What's worse is that the "organic" label in no way means "no pesticides". It means they used what they call "organic pesticides", which are pesticides that are chemically similar to some of nature's more potent toxins. What's not allowed on organic produce are the newer, more targeted pesticides which designed to be effective against insects but harmless to people. Instead, organic pesticides are based on the chemistry of toxic plants.
It's like using belladonna (deadly nightshade) to treat ulcers. It works if you happen to get a belladonna plant with just the right concentration of hyoscyamine, and you take just the right amount, but it's a hell of a lot safer and more effective to use modern compounds like amoxicillin or Prilosec.
In one recent USDA study, lettuce marketed as organic contained, on average, ten times the amount of pesticide as lettuce not marked organic. That's because "regular" lettuce can use trace amounts of modern, much more effective, compounds, rather than drowning the lettuce in a toxin that's naturally produced by a bacterium.
The dominant weed killers in the city are concrete and asphalt.
You've got that backwards. The dominant concrete and asphalt killers in my driveway and sidewalk are weeds.
-- Alastair
I already have weeder robots on our farm. They eliminate the need to use herbicides and pesticides because not only do they pull the weeds but they also kill rodents and insects that are problems for our crops. I have the versions called D.U.C.K.S. and C.H.I.C.K.E.N.S, - They work great.
Seriously. Properly timed rotations of ducks and chickens through corn, brassicas, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, sunflowers and other crops do wonders to remove the weeds prior to planting and after the crops have grown to about 12" to 18" in height.
Prior to all of this we use the biorobotic tilling machines called P.I.G.S..
As an added benefit all of these robots excrete organic fertilizers that are specially formulated to make our crops thrive. It's called S.H.I.T.
Finally, at the end of the biorobot's service life rather than repairing them we disassemble them and pack up the drive components to sell as high quality organic meat. What a win-win situation for farmers, consumers and the environment! Of course, pesticide producers are rather P.I.S.S.E.D. but that can be used for fertilizer too as it is high in beneficial nitrogen need by crops.