Just buy or rent a goat. Those things love poison ivy.

Well now you've done it.

Why use lasers when we can genetically engineer goats to hate the taste of corn/sorghum/wheat and love the taste of weeds?

That's basically how tea cultivation has historically worked. If you let a goat loose on a tea field it will eat literally everything but the tea plants.

That’s honestly a billion dollar idea. Or modify the stalks of those plants to be extremely bitter. Goats already love the taste of weeds and would select for them.

Grazing animals would eat the weeds and naturally fertilizer the land. No harm if they don’t totally kill the weed, more food to fatten them up.

It's probably a cheaper idea too, well in terms of development costs. The trade off is that it'll take longer to prove out. Just get a farm and a good enough lab for goat/sheep/chinchilla/etc germ-line modification and prove it out over a few generations. Minus the salary and feed costs, it'll probably be less than the laser itself.

Granted, that's just a billion dollar idea. The multi-billion dollar idea is, as you said, to modify the animal and the plant together. The goats hate some taste in the corn, and the corn produces the taste such that humans cannot taste it. Maybe it'll ripen after harvest and the taste will lessen. I dunno. This way you can double-dip and charge the farmers on the new plant varietals and the goats. Bonus points if you can modify the goats to produce milk that's got vitamin-D in it or something.

I've seen this set-up in Victoria and SA before. The goats eat the grasses/weeds that grow in-between the grapes of vineyards. I've no idea if the goats eat the grapes every once in a while. The wine grapes are pretty sour and bitter to us humans at least.

It would be very 'green' overall.

10x for developing the timing system by which you don't need to engineer either plant or animal and you graze the fields before the tender plant is planted. Thus reducing your inputs 100-fold or more and reducing your risk model and PR spend to sell the engineering to the world.

This most likely wouldn't be safe for poison ivy removal. Burning poison ivy creates a toxic cloud. As much as poison ivy isn't fun, poison ivy in your throat and lungs is even less fun.

You need to think more "hit it with enough energy to break cell walls and kill the weed" and not "burn it in fire like a SciFi movie.

The robot has nobody near it. Toxic clouds would burn with no ill effect to humans.

Presumably the laser wouldn't be setting the whole plant up in smoke. Couldn't it target the base and let it fall?

My understanding of poison ivy is that no part of the plant is nontoxic. Burning just the base would minimize the toxic cloud, but not eliminate it.

I really don't think that burning a line an inch long and 1/16th of an inch thick at the bottom of a stem is going to release any significant amount of toxic cloud. A tiny bit if you're right there next to it, sure, but it would be dissipated within a few minutes.

Yeah, my first thought was whether we can we have these robots working continuously on the knotweed that's taking over everywhere.