Robot in use: Farmdroid for seeding & weeding

The world’s first sustainable robot that can plant, weed and hoe has joined the farm machinery and workforce of organic farmer Eberhard Weisskopf. Eberhard is a pioneering farmer in Europe’s agricultural sector who uses robotics to make organic farming a more profitable and greener business.

​

Passers-by often pause with astonishment when they go past Eberhard Weisskopf’s beet fields near the village of Altenweddingen in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. 

“That's right, my robots have become somewhat of a crowd-puller. People come up and ask, ‘What’s that unmanned thing driving around in your fields?’,” farmer Eberhard Weisskopf recounts. He tells them that they are two FD20 robots made by the Danish robot manufacturer FarmDroid.

The COVID-19 lockdown prompted Eberhard Weisskopf to implement his automation plans earlier than he had expected, because it threatened his farm’s otherwise most lucrative and popular crop: sugar beets. The border closures made it impossible for him to recruit and house the forty migrant workers who usually do the hoeing of Eberhard Weisskopf’s 60 hectares of beet fields in the spring. 

The timing was critical: if Weisskopf had not found a solution for weeding his sugar beets within two or three weeks, he would have had to abandon raising sugar beets in 2020. 

“Raising organic sugar beets without manual labour for weeding is not an option,” Eberhard Weisskopf points out. “I heard about FarmDroid by accident, and the robots saved this year's sugar beet harvest, because otherwise we’d have given up on them.” 

Each robot is designed to weed and hoe 20 hectares per season. They do this by constantly hoeing for eight weeks until the beet plants have grown big enough to dominate the field themselves. During this period, the robots manage to run through the fields five times because they operate almost round the clock – weeding thoroughly and slowly at less than one kilometre an hour.

The repayment period is reasonable, in Eberhard Weisskopf’s opinion:“It takes them 100–120 hours per hectare to manually hoe the beets, and the migrant workers cost me EUR 15 an hour. The investment in the FarmDroid robots will pay for itself in two years,” notes Eberhard Weisskopf, who is relieved to be released from the heavy responsibility of housing forty employees on the farm for a few months. Now, the 700-hectare farm has four year-round employees also doing work as ‘robot operators’.

When rows in a beet field are hoed manually, experience shows that 20–30% of the beet sprouts are removed because it is hard for the human eye to discern between weed and crop. This wastes about 20,000 beet sprouts per hectare.  Thanks to his FD20 robots, Eberhard Weisskopf has now eliminated this waste.

​

By contrast with other solutions on the market, the FD20 does not depend on camera technology to distinguish between weeds and beet plants; instead, the robots know exactly where the beet seeds are because they planted them. The robots navigate using high-precision GPS technology and operate at just the right (slow) speed. This enables them to plant the beet seeds with such precision that they can subsequently weed plants and rows just as precisely. This way, the robots adroitly hoe around beet plants, even when the beets are only seedlings.

​