Thanks. I am interested in small acreage robotics to automate most of farming except harvest. Weeding is a very small part of growing food.

The reason Big Ag(not necessarily commodity Ag) is focused on giant weeding robots(for crops like potatoes, cotton, lettuce etc..those in the billion dollar club) is because the investment is coming from chemical inputs companies. It is very likely that the same pot of money going to finance Monsanto/Bayer is also funding Agtech and ag robotics because they are hedging their chemical industry investment. So if Ag stops using roundup, they’d use weeding robots and theair market share is protected.

Also why small scale food Ag is not dealt with right now. It’s too small a market and there is enough cheap labour and third world countries to import food from..maybe agtech will reach them eventually. But until then they won’t allow product cannibalisation. And if any small acreage Agtech or Ag robots become successful they will be bought out by the big investment firms or through smaller VCs and shelved. It will come out of its dark vault when the time feels right. We have the tech. It’s just not profitable to release it to farmers.

My goal is to automate everything with small robots and then scale by swarming them. I would love to connect. My email is my user name at gmail.

How could a robot keep more than a couple of acres weeded? Small amounts of acreage in real food would be more valuable to humans than vast tracts of frankenfood like Monsanto soybeans. There are already "at-scale" solutions for that crap: just spray it (and everything downwind!) with tons of noxious chemicals.

The other commenter is correct - swarms.

Also our robot is capable of spraying but will primarily use mechanical means to destroy weeds so there is no chemical use.

Above you said "it feels like we need to target farms that are hundreds or thousands of acres to justify the engineering investment." That seems like a reason not to fund your startup, because farms like that already have chemical weed control and giant corporations that already zealously own their souls. I was trying to encourage you to think smaller. By acre, vegetables are much more valuable than wheat and corn and beans, and there are human labor inputs that robots could replace.

The farms we’re looking to target are vegetable farms. They use human labor to weed their crops. The few I’ve spoken to have hundreds or thousands of acres total. They seem eager to get a robot like ours.

Haha I might have misread an "or" as an "of". Your robots sound great, a real benefit to humanity.

Ahh yes hundreds “of” thousands would be huge!

Long term, I’d love to automate the entire process. We just have to start somewhere. Weeding seems like a safe place to start, and there’s plenty more work to be found once we get our foot in the door.

I’ll tell ya one thing - I love working with robots outside. I mostly work in the office but I love getting out to test the machine. :)

Small robots swarmed.

The rental of farming fields goes back to time inmemorial.

In fact it is only a modern progress that has resulted in ownership actually working the fields they own.

This is where the feudal lords came in and what peasants actually were.

It is still pretty rare to find small farmland ownership in all of south america and asia. USA is the exception, not the rule.

A bit off-topic, but I'm very interested in gaining an insight into what do you think what kind of innovation we need, and why?

It’s a good question! I’ll be honest - I’m a robotics engineer not a farmer. I’ve found that weeding is a good place to start according to the farmers I’ve spoken to. But the real innovations needed should come from a large group of users. That’s why I’m doing my best to ensure we can open source our machine. I’m inspired by the way open source 3D printers crowd sourced much of the innovation that got us where we are today (along with many dedicated companies which made their own improvements).