Robotic Organic Gardening is the coolest new thing. You are now saying to yourself; Yah Right! How can it be pure organic gardening if you are using advanced technologies like robots? That just doesn’t seem right some how? It may not seem right, but it is now available. Imagine the problem of weeding an organic field, you cannot use pesticides or chemicals otherwise it would not be an organically grown crop.
Well that problem has now been solved by Bjorn Astrand from the University of Hamstad in Sweden who has developed a robot, which has the visual acuity to recognize the difference between a weed and the actual crop. It travels down the rows and picks the weeds one by one; well, actually it can pick many more than one weed at a time. This means certified organic foods and crops and lower and more comparable prices.
Does this mean curtains for Cargill and Monsanto? Certainly not, there is still GM Crops for growing medicine, fuel and massive growing to feed the world. They have diversified into BioTech and are doing fine. But you can bet that as these types of robotics become more available that farmers will in fact look at this option.
Currently due to the cost of this it still does not makes sense for the non-organic commercial farmer. Right now it cuts the hand weeding costs by half for the less efficient organic farmer. But the day will come when robotic gardeners will be less expensive and therefore widely used. That future is nearly here. Think on that.
"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is a guest writer for Our Spokane Magazine in Spokane, Washington |
No comments:
Post a Comment