I am really looking forward to the day we can replace chemical herbicides with weed-hunting robots. It seems such a huge market opportunity... little, inexpensive bots that can roam a field, picking out weeds the moment they appear as seedlings, never touching the crop itself, not putting anything in the soil.
When I was a kid growing up in central Illinois in the 1970s, before Roundup, "walking beans" was a common summer job for kids. You'd go out into soybean fields with some tools and rip out everything that wasn't a soybean plant. Of course, spraying chemicals is cheaper than hiring a busload of kids, so that's just a memory now.
When I was a kid growing up in central Illinois in the 1970s, before Roundup, "walking beans" was a common summer job for kids. You'd go out into soybean fields with some tools and rip out everything that wasn't a soybean plant. Of course, spraying chemicals is cheaper than hiring a busload of kids, so that's just a memory now.