[North by Northwest]
“That’s funny, that robot’s weeding where there ain’t no weeds.”
Roger Thornhill: (starts running)
[/North by Northwest]
Yeah.
My first thought is accidentally burning up the crop.
What you need is a Tertill. It is a solar-powered robot with a built-weed whacker. The cost is around $350, but more like $430 with all the extras. AFAIK, it is from the same company that gave us the Roomba.
Or the resulting fine-ash covering the leaves of the plants you want to keep.
Crappy design. It’s about 18" long (although the specs say 10" but if you look at the photos that can’t be true). That’s too short to use standing up, and too long to use on your knees. So you have to bend over to use it. The target market is people (like me) who are old enough to have the money and lazy enough to want something like this, but people like me hate to work bent over, it makes our backs hurt. It should be 39 to 42 inches long, which they could easily have done with under $5 of additional materials.
Probably. Flame weeders are.
Whether this thing is an improvement on flame weeders isn’t clear to me, though it might be. Whoever wrote the article doesn’t seem to have heard of any weeding technology other than hand weeding; this is going to be competing not only with flame weeders but also with all sorts of mechanical cultivation methods.
Any plant is a weed if it’s growing where a human doesn’t want it to. This includes plants that are crops if they’re growing where humans do want them to.
You could build a lovely disaster story by having your ‘FarmNet’ programmed by somebody who didn’t understand that.
Depends both on the weed and on its growth stage.
Quite a lot of things will grow back from the roots; but if they’re repeatedly clobbered at a growth stage in which most of their nutrients are in the top of the plant, they’ll give up sooner. And if they’re just getting started there may not be enough root system for them to regrow at all.
So does tillage (in a somewhat different sense of ‘burning’); though we’re working on reducing that also, partly for that reason and partly because it’s bad for soil life. Very shallow tillage doesn’t do much damage, though.
If it can get rid of that annoying vine thing with the invisible spines that make it stick to anything it touches, I am all for that device.