I appreciate your comments Jeremy! Great conversation.

Did you see the part where the Greenfield robots work in no-till production? As in, they are driving through crimped cover crop fields that crops have been planted into. Unfortunately, some weed species (like pigweed) still love competiting in those conditions (cover crops don’t control them one bit!). The robots (which are run on solar-powered batteries btw, not electricity) control the pigweed which means more farmers can convert to no-till solutions using cover crop practices. Companion planting, or interplanting/strip planting crops, is also done in a lot of no-till solutions. Like lentils planted in between barley, but they also still have persistent weed issues that are hard to manage that a robotic solution would be a welcome relief.

In the UK, those farmers would love to get back to healthier soil that tillage has destroyed and they believe just by doing that, they will eventually eliminatetheir problem with black grass(which likes compacted soils). But to get there, they need a solution that allows them to weed without chemicals (or heavy equipment) and maintain no-till practices.

Remember, we’re not talking about a few acres of tomatoes or specialty fruits or vegetables here, which take up a very small percentage of actual farmed land, but hundreds of thousands of acres planted into the pulses and grain crops around the world.

That all said, I know of several small-scale, diversified vegetable and fruit growers using organic and regenerative, no-till practices that are pursuing their own robotic solutions for replacing a lot of the work required by traditional farm labor including weeding and harvesting.