The nutrient content of our vegetables is down 40% over the last two decades and our soil health is suffering due to increasingly harsh herbicide use, according to Carbon Robotics founder Paul Mikesell.
that “crops grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today.”Weeds are getting harder to kill as herbicide-resistant varieties survive, forcing herbicide manufacturers to reformulate ever-more-potent chemicals. That has potential impacts on farmer health — rumors of chemicals like glyphosate contributing to cancer and paraquat leading to Parkinson’s — and it has serious impacts on soil health.
The weeding machine is a beast at almost 10,000 pounds. It boasts no fewer than eight independently-aimed 150-watt lasers, typically used for metal cutting, that can fire 20 times per second. They’re guided by 12 high-resolution cameras connected to AI systems that can recognize good crops from bad weeds. The Laserweeder drives itself with computer vision, finding the furrows in the fields, positioning itself with GPS, and searching for obstacles with LIDAR.“It’s able to say ...
It also works all night long, with high-powered lights that illuminate the crop bed so the cameras can see the plants clearly and the computer systems can identify them.“It’s very effective,” says Mikesell. “We’ve done this through several seasons now. The farmers are elated and we’ve been able to save them a lot of money on their weed bills.”
Carbon Robotics is just coming out of the prototype phase and into a commercialization phase now. The company has raised a $27 million series B investment, which will be invested into growing sales, support, engineering, and kicking off a marketing machine.As with all new technology, the ultimate proof will be a few years coming as farmers increasingly adopt this kind of technology and torture test it.
But a solution for weed control that doesn’t involve putting herbicide — literally poison for at least some kinds of plants — has to be a positive.“One of the great things about farmers is they’re super innovative. And so if you sit down with somebody and talk about, well, what kind of things are giving you a problem? What kind of things do you think could be automated? You’ll get hours of conversation.
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