Farming robots to help you grow onions 🧅
How robots can help prepare the soil for sowing onions?
Agriculture robots can help you on different plant growth stages of onions. Where the seasons starts with sowing, the robots can already help prepare the soil for sowing (and also actual sowing, in the section below).
To prepare your soil for onions a light but precise operations is needed. Ideally, the top part is very flat and the soil below the depth where the onion seed will land is untouched. Normally, soil conditions for preparing for sowing onions are dry. Therefore, it's a relative low-power demanding tillage task to do. Enabling also less powerful robots to execute the tillage task to prepare the soil for seeding onions.
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To prepare the soil for sowing onions with robots, the Agxeed Agbot is an high capacity example.
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What are the ups and downs of sowing onions with robots?
The chance is high that you currently sow onions with an air-supported sowing machine.
One step back, why is there air-support?Due to the small and light seeds of the onions, not all seeds may fall properly in the wholes of the discs that 'drop' the seeds. By creating an air-vacuum on the sowing disc, sowing onions on your field can run at a decent speed and without missing places.
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A bit like with preparing the soil for sowing onions, also for sowing we can make a split in approach. The key difference is basically determined on if you can make use of air-support when sowing onions, or not. Therefore, the two different approach to sowing onions with an agriculture robot are:
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Sowing onions on high speed, typically requiring a PTO for air support, with as example the Agrointelli Robotti.
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Sowing onions at low speed, where a very light machine can do the job, wit as example the Farmdroid FD 20
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Do you weed mechanically and with human labor in onions?
Photo of weeding by hand in practice supported on Elatec machine.
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