On a sweltering summer day in central Kansas, the farm fields glow with heat as Clint Brauer watches a team of bright yellow robots bustle up and down the rows, tirelessly cutting down any weeds that get in their way, avoiding growing crops.
The battery-powered machines, measuring 1.2 meters long and 0.6 meters wide, traverse the fields with precision, without any human hands to guide them.
Brauer, a California-based former technology executive who returned to his family farm in central Kansas after his father developed Parkinson’s disease, sees robots as essential tools to help farmers reduce their dependence on chemicals. and better protect their health and the environment. .
From him Green field agricultural technology company now builds and programs its robots in a shed behind an old farmhouse where his grandmother once lived. Twenty farmers are signed up for robotic services this season, and the company expects to weed 5,000 acres (2,023 hectares) this year.
“The answer is here,” he said. “This solves a lot of problems for farmers.”
Farmers have been battling weeds in their fields – pulling them out, cutting them down and killing them with a variety of tools – for centuries. Weeds compete with crops for soil moisture and nutrients and can block sunlight needed for crop growth, reducing final production. For the past 50+ years, chemical eradication has been the method of choice. It is common for farmers to spray or apply multiple chemicals to kill weeds in their fields in a single season.
But as the use of chemicals has expanded, so has scientific evidence that exposure to the toxic substances in herbicides can cause disease. In addition to glyphosate’s link to cancer, paraquat, a chemical that kills weeds, has been linked to Parkinson’s disease. Another common agricultural 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 pollinators and other important species. The widespread use of herbicides in agriculture has fueled weed resistance, leaving many farmers struggling to control weeds in their fields, even with repeated herbicide applications.
A ‘personal mission’
Financial support is flowing to companies that make weed-killing robots from venture capital funds, private investors and large food and agricultural companies eager to bet on robots as a way to promote more sustainable food production.
The investment arm of Chipotle Mexican Grill, the global restaurant chain, is among Greenfield investors. 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.
Based in North Dakota Aigen Robotics has raised $19 million to date. Its compact robots are powered by solar panels attached to the top of each machine and are designed to work autonomously, sleeping and waking in agricultural fields.
Kenny Lee, co-founder and CEO of Aigen who previously worked in cybersecurity, said he and his partner Richard Wurden, who worked in the electric vehicle industry, are on a “personal mission” to reduce the use of herbicides in agriculture. Lee is a survivor of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has found can be caused by glyphosate-based herbicides, such as the popular brand Roundup.
The company is deploying 50 robots this summer in sugar beet fields in the U.S. Midwest, with the goal of increasing its fleet to 500 for use across a wide range of crops.
Other companies are launching agricultural robots specifically designed to spray herbicides in more precise ways than conventional methods, according to developers.
Even global agrochemical company Bayer, which sells Roundup herbicides, is taking action interest in robots for farms.
What skeptics are saying
Still, many farmers and academic experts doubt that agricultural robots can make a substantial difference. They say there is simply too much farmland and too many diverse needs to be met by robots that are expensive to manufacture and use. The best path, many say, is for farmers to work with nature, not against it.
The regenerative agriculture model – using a variety of strategies focused on improving soil health, including limiting pesticides, rotating crops, planting crops that provide ground cover to suppress weeds and avoid disturbing the soil – is the best way, they say.
“I think robots can be a useful tool as part of an integrated approach to weeds, but using them as a single tool… probably won’t work as well,” said Adam Davis, professor and head of the research department at University of Illinois. Harvest science.
Wisconsin farmer Ryan Erisman agreed. “Weed pulling robots represent yet another round in the arms race against nature,” he said. “Many of our agricultural tools are actually weapons… that we use against perceived threats. When we keep facing the same problem year after year or season after season, it’s not our tools, our techniques, or our technology that need to be overhauled. It is our failure to understand the system we work in and our relationship to it.”
Despite the naysayers, Kansas farmer Torrey Ball eagerly awaits his turn in Greenfield’s robotic fleet. Last year, the company’s robots weeded its sunflower fields. This month they will weed part of their soybean area.
Ball is a longtime user of many of the leading anti-weed herbicides and knows firsthand how expensive and ineffective some products have become as weeds have developed resistance to widely used chemicals, especially glyphosate. He also knows about the research showing risks to human health and worries about what chemicals are doing to water quality.
For now, he only manages the robots on a small part of his 809-hectare farm, but he hopes that one day they can help him free himself from drug addiction across all of his land.
“If we can use less chemicals, I’m all for it,” Ball said. “We will try to leave the land in better shape than when we took it over, which we hope is everyone’s goal.”
This story is co-published with New LEDa journalism project by the Environmental Working Group
