PASCO, Wash. – A quickly rising A.I. company has designed a machine to help on the farm. The machine is called the Laserweeder.
Some farmers are using this machine to kill weeds and say it could save them money.
According to Kyle Buse, owner of Angel Brook Farms in Pasco, he was told in his agriculture class the definition of a weed is anything growing where you don’t want it to. Carbon Robotics has come up with a formula to help with weed control.
“The more I learn about AI, half of me is fascinated by it, the other half of me is scared,” said Buse.
The recent uptick of AI is progressing quickly. Buse says he thinks that’s a good thing.
“I think it’s going to continually, for the most part make the world a better place,” said Buse.
This includes making farmers’ jobs easier when it comes to weed control.
“I would think that AI is going to find itself in agriculture in just as big a way as other things,” Buse says.
Carbon Robotics owner and CEO, Paul Mikesell says this new technology will be cost-effective in the long run.
“It saves them money because they don’t have to go find labor,” said Mikesell. “It saves them money because they don’t have to spray chemicals and all this stuff. So, we’ve heard feedback from farmers which was I love the way its weed control, but can you also do thinning? So, we’ve added laser thinning as well.”
He and his team worked hard to come up with a formula to assist farmers with their weeds by making the Laserweeder.
“What we do is we give the AI system laser to shoot these weeds with and that’s what it does,” says Mikesell.
He tells me the way it works is, they’ve got cameras feeding the neuronet real time information and the 30 lasers are triggered to target the weeds.
Mikesell and his team began developing this Laserweeder over four years ago, and in May of last year, the first one shipped.
I did ask Buse if he would trust an AI based machine…
“Certainly,” said Buse. “I think it will get more and more widely used and I kind of look forward to what kind of technology that might be out there that I could take advantage of.”
Mikesell says the reason he opened up a shop here in the Tri-Cities is because of the location, the agriculture, the farmers and there’s a lot of good people here.
