Precision Farming | Remember Hard Tomatoes? Well, Get Ready for Bland Lettuce
This CGI of the robotic weeding of what surely must be GMO corn was developed for a commercial featuring the herbicide Halex GT, a weed-control herbicide produced by Switzerland’s Syngenta AG. Credit: Kunochan . Lettuce Be WILL GROWERS FINALLY SHIFT TO MORE FULLY AUTOMATED AGRICULTURE? Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | January 22, 2014 I first became interested in agricultural robots around 1997. I had just read the amazing RAFI Communique on Bioserfdom: technology, intellectual property, and the erosion of farmers’ rights in the industrialized world . This is not light reading and the discussion of precision farming in that RAFI [i] report, that I believe was prepared by the inimitable Hope Shand, is what got me thinking about broader applications of harvest mechanization and automation. The rest of the food system was getting automated, I remember thinking: Why not the harvesting of a broader range of what are currently labor-intensive row crops? Those of us who came of age in th...