Technology is rapidly advancing in all areas of society, including agriculture. In both conventional and organic systems, there is a need to apply technology beyond our current approach to improve the efficiency and economics of management. Weeds, in particular, have been part of cropping systems for centuries often being ranked as the number one production cost. Now, public demand for a sustainably grown product has created economic incentives for producers to improve their practices, yet the development of advanced weed control tools beyond biotech has lagged behind. An opportunity has been created for engineers and weed scientists to pool their knowledge and work together to ‘fill the gap’ in managing weeds in crops. Never before has there been such pressure to produce more with less in order to sustain our economies and environments. This book is the first to provide a radically new approach to weed management that could change cropping systems both now and in the future.
This book shifts the paradigm that weeds can only be controlled using broadcast applications of chemical and mechanical techniques in distinct spatiotemporal scales, also referred to as integrated weed management. In fact, true integrated weed management is more than just diversification of techniques and for the first time could be achieved using advanced technologies. Automated weed control is not the proverbial ‘silver bullet’, but an entirely new approach in cropping systems where multiple weed control strategies are available for use at the same time.
In an automated system, sensor and computer technologies onboard a robot would first categorize each and every plant in a farmer’s field as either weed or crop, and then go on to identify the species of weed. Once those identifications were made, multiple weed fighting strategies located on a single platform could be applied to individual plants based on their biology. If the system identified a weed that’s resistant to Roundup™, for example, it could be spritzed with a different herbicide. Or an onboard cutting or flaming micro-tool could be used to kill the plant instead.
The production of a book that addresses weed control of the future will have profound impacts on current and future cropping systems across the globe. To date, no other resource exists on this important and rapidly advancing topic of automated weed control in cropping systems. In the near future, a new approach will be needed for managing weeds, especially with the challenges of weed resistance to herbicides, off-site movement of soil, fertilizers, and chemicals, an increasingly non-agrarian public, labor shortages, economies in recession, and the continued rural to suburban land use conversion. Automation is part of the solution.
