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For many years we talked about ag robotics and automation in a more of a mythical or science fiction sense.

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But today robotics and agriculture are a commercial reality.

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With that comes a lot of complexity and competition in the marketplace, and in this video, we’ll talk about the technology that’s changed to make this practical and help you sort out what would make it feasible in your farming operation.

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In this presentation, we’ll talk about the challenges that farmers want to overcome with robotics and automation.

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We’ll talk about the technology that’s needed to achieve those goals.

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I’ll give you an update on the status of robotics and automation, specifically for weed management.

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And finally, we’ll end where all this goes from here.

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In the development of ag robotics and automation, a fast changing field,

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There are many challenges in weed management that could be addressed with novel tools and ag robotics and automation.

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Simply put, herbicide resistance is out of control.

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In the picture on the slide before you now, you see waterhemp, a species that’s often found with resistance to several herbicide sites of action within a single plant, up to 7 herbicide site of action resistances in individual populations.

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To make matters worse, new herbicide sites of action are few and far between.

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The introduction of herbicide resistant traits and common crops such as soy and corn limited new herbicide research and development because those tools were effective, affordable, and efficient for many years.

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However, in the advent of herbicide resistance, we need new tools to be developed to overcome the resistant weeds, but that takes many years, decades, and hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development.

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Furthermore, regulation will continue to limit pesticide use.

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For example, the recently adopted herbicide strategy to address threatened and endangered species will require drift buffers and runoff and erosion risk mitigation measures to be able to continue to use herbicides and agricultural crops.

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This could limit use of some products.

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We’re also realizing in specialty crops that existing herbicide programs can be injurious and reduce high value crop yield and quality.

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Many of these products were evaluated as individual herbicides and individual applications.

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But what we’re finding now is that over the cumulative use of several different herbicide applications that injury can compound itself and reduce yield and quality.

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And finally, hand weeding labor if it is available is often overly costly and prohibitive in adoption and many crops including specialty crops.

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So what technology do we need to achieve these goals?

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There’s really three steps in a broad sense.

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Number one, to be able to detect weeds from crops with accurate high resolution imaging on the tool itself, to be able to interpret those images with artificial intelligence, not only to separate the crop from the weeds, but to be able to identify weeds by species and even the growing point location on those weeds.

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And finally, we need novel control tools.

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Simply spraying the same herbicides for which we see resistance won’t result in better control.

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So we need some novel mechanism to be able to manage those herbicide resistant weeds and as a bonus we need to automate these processes or be able to remotely operate these novel control tools.

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There are many different tools under development or commercialized already to try to achieve those goals.

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On the screen now we see the Sharpshooter by Verdant Robotics, a tool designed to micro fertilize and micro spray herbicides, particularly in specialty crops.

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It has a combination of high resolution imaging data interpretation and micro turret sprayers to be able to spray the fertilizer herbicide only where needed.

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And the result is we can drastically reduce herbicide use overall as you see in the green agricultural spray dye in this leafy green field.

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There are also several spot cultivators available now that again use the combination of image capture and analysis to target only weeds where they exist with the cultivator or to be able to thin some crops like leafy greens as you see here in this demonstration in California.

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And finally, we also have novel tools that use lasers to control weeds on the screen now you see the Carbon Robotics laser weeder.

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This is what would be considered a generation one laser weeder 20 feet in width.

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The utilizes 42 high resolution cameras, artificial intelligence that interprets where the crop is versus the weeds, the weeds by species, and the weed growing points.

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And then the tool uses that information to target the weeds with 30 carbon dioxide lasers that fire up to every 50 milliseconds, killing up to 300,000 weeds per hour.

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This is a first generation tool.

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More recently, Carbon Robotics has introduced their second generation tool available in widths up to 60 feet and utilizing more efficient diode lasers so that it can cover a lot more ground a lot faster.

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In 2024, we evaluated the generation one laser weeder and replicated field trials in direct seeded dry bulb onions.

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This research was conducted in two sites on the commercial farm and the onions were seeded in early May to accommodate the laser weeder arrival.

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This is important because in our conventional herbicide program, we only used 5 herbicide applications, but had we planted earlier more typical of the rest of the commercial farm, we likely would have used up to 10 or 12 herbicide applications.

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Our treatments included that conventional herbicide program with five applications, the laser weeder used alone four times during the season, a single pre emergent residual herbicide at onion seeding plus 4 laser weedings and then the single pre emergent herbicide, a post emergent residual herbicide toward onion canopy closure to extend the weed control toward the end of the crop season and the laser weeder 4 times across the field.

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I’ll share with you the results from our moderate weed intensity site that would be typical of the commercial fields that surrounded this research.

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In the case of weed management, we had yellowed nutsedge and spotted spurge populations in the field as well as large crabgrass that came out later in the season.

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And importantly, we saw no differences in weed management among any of the treatments where the grower conventional herbicide was used without laser weeding, laser weeding alone or laser weeding combined with reduced herbicide applications.

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When it came to onion development, we did see significant cumulative injury in the grower conventional herbicide program from those multiple applications up to 18% injury in June compared to no injury where the laser weeder was used alone.

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We presume because of that herbicide injury in the grower conventional standard, we saw reduced onion growth.

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We had less onion population or stand density in the grower conventional herbicide compared to where we were using the laser weeder.

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And we had greater number of leaves on the onions where the laser weeder was used compared to the conventional grower standard.

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And this resulted in fewer onions with smaller diameter at the end of the season that harvest where we focused more on using the laser weeder combined with reduced herbicide programs.

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This is important because of smaller diameter onions are less desirable in the market.

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We did not see a statistically significant difference in larger diameter onion yield among those treatments, although there were a lot more onions where we were combining the laser weeder with reduced herbicide programs in the residual herbicides.

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And importantly, very little hand weeding was required among any of these treatments and moderate weed intensity.

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This gives you a visual of how accurate the laser weeder is.

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This is a single leaf onion.

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The cotyledon is drying up and resting against it is a spotted spurge weed.

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Not only did the laser weeder hit the spotted spurge without injuring or touching the onion, but it only hit the spotted spurge at the growing point with sub-millimeter accuracy.

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This picture gives you an idea of the enhanced onion growth that we can see where we’re reducing herbicide use in favor of laser weedings.

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On the right hand side of the picture we see the onions from where the laser weeder was used four times with a single pre emergent residual herbicide.

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We see more leaves, larger onions that matured earlier and even in middle of June when this picture was taken, enhanced bulb growth on those onions compared to the grower conventional standard on the left hand side of the picture.

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We learned a lot from this work in 2024.

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Most importantly, we learned that the real time detection, mapping and laser technology used in real time as the machine moved across the field was amazingly effective and efficient, again with sub-millimeter accuracy and shooting up to 300,000 weeds per hour.

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I noticed the sub lethal cumulative injury from just five herbicide applications that the potential to reduce yield, reduce the harvest diameter of those onions and lengthen our season to maturity, reducing the marketability in the very early season compared to where we were using the laser weeder.

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Now this can all be moderated by other factors on onion production such as Stemphylium leaf blight and asters yellow.

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But if we control those other factors, there’s a potential stand and yield gain where we’re reducing our herbicide use in favor of the laser weeder in the high weed intensity onions.

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The laser weeder used four times couldn’t keep up with weed emergence keeping in mind that it’s similar to contact post emerging herbicide in that it doesn’t provide any soil residual after it goes over the field.

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And then the case of the high weed intensity onions, we required a lot more hand weeding time than in the grower conventional herbicide program.

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However, in a more moderate weed intensity onion field typical of the commercial production surrounding our studies, a pre emergent herbicide and laser weeding four times was conventional to the conventional was similar to the conventional herbicide program in terms of weed management.

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So from here on out we’re looking at how do we speed the tool up so that we can cover more ground faster.

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We’re looking at things like banding the lasers to avoid the barley cover crop that you see in the picture on this slide.

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The barley cover crop is used to reduce wind erosion damage to the onions, but it slows down the laser weeder.

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So we now band the laser weeder over the onion rows where weed management is needed and control the barley cover crop with a post emergent grass herbicide.

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We’re also looking at banding or spot spraying the herbicides again without crop contact, so we don’t get that cumulative injury, but to allow the laser weeder to go faster over the field.

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Similarly, we’re also looking at turning off the lasering of larger yellow nutsedge patches.

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These established perennials are very difficult to control and slow down the machine significantly.

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So that’s where we’ll turn our attention and hand weeding.

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And finally, we look to use residual herbicides at planting combined with laser weeding and then a single pre emergent residual herbicide is the onion canopy starts to close to extend our weed control through the crop season.

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There’s also much work in commercialization and development looking at automating these tools from many different operators.

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In this case you’re looking at the Telefarmer system by Agtonomy machines that can carry everything from harvest bins to mowers and air blast sprayers.

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And these tools are really independent of scale.

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In this case, you’re looking at a larger scale tool.

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This is a tool carrier by Swarm Farm Robotics called the Swarm Bot, carrying a larger scale spray boom.

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But they’re not limited to large scale agricultural operations.

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There are many tools and development and commercialization for diversified small scale farms such as vegetable farms and the case.

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On the left hand side of this picture, you see the Oz by Naio that’s capable of many tasks including planting, tillage and mechanical weeding.

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And similarly on the right hand side of the slide you see the Amiga by farm ng, what they call their micro tractor, a tool carrier that can carry many small scale implements ranging from Cedars to cultivators and even compost spreaders.

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So where do these novel tools best fit now and crops where labor availability and cost is limiting production, where our current weed management tools such as existing herbicide portfolios are limited or sub lethal herbicide injury such as what we saw in the onions is impacting crop yield, quality and marketability.

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And with with any new technology, these tools are expensive and are best fit for where our crop value is high.

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In closing, this area is changing rapidly.

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Stay tuned for further development in ag robotics and automation.

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And thanks for watching this video.