Lasers and robots: how U.S. farmers are tackling a declining workforce with automation

America has been called the “breadbasket of the world” due to its export of food products across the globe. Now, with the U.S. agriculture industry grappling with a shrinking labor force and aging farmers, many operations are pivoting to automation. The manufacturer, Carbon Robotics, is making the machines that use lasers and artificial intelligence in the U.S. and selling them to farms across the country and in Europe. It can recognize weeds and distinguish them from plants the farmer wants to keep. “So in our large plant model, we have over 150 million plants already labeled so that when those cameras and the NVIDIA GPUs see a crop or a weed, it pulls from that database to decide if it has to shoot it or not,” says Brian Ballard from Carbon Robotics. The laser weeding robots cost anywhere from $500,000 to $1.4 million, depending on size, and kill weeds that emerge shortly after crops are planted. The robots work with any food crops. Rutgers University is working with Carbon Robotics on developing the tech. So far, their data suggests this could be an improvement on other methods. “We realized that this kind of equipment is as effective as traditional herbicides. And in addition, we realized that some of these traditional herbicides are still hurting the crop. You can still have crop stunting, less biomass production for this crop when you use an herbicide. And it's something that you don't see when you use a LaserWeeder. We did experimentation in spinach and peas, and we have up to 30% yield increase where we use a LaserWeeder. Why? Because we didn't have any herbicides that could potentially be damaging to the crop,” says Thierry Besançon, an Extension Weed Science Specialist at Rutgers University. The shift toward technology comes as the labor pool tightens. This article was provided by The Associated Press.