By: Samuel Guo
The laser weeder is one of many new technologies farmers use to help them farm, by taking less of the farmer's time by not hiring manpower to weed the fields.
Laser weeders work by determining the weeds that are bad by using a supercomputer, GPS, and the vision of a computer to help them determine which weeds are bad. Then they fire eight carbon dioxide lasers at the weeds to kill them.
Laser weeders can kill 28 weeds per second: that’s 100,000 weeds per hour. Laser weeders can weed 15 to 20 acres of land in a day. They move at 5 miles per hour. They have 12 high-resolution cameras that constantly scan the floor for weed.
Meanwhile, an onboard supercomputer uses machine learning to identify unwanted plants in milliseconds. This helps farmers a lot. For context a, vegetable farmer said that he usually hires a 30-person crew for a full day of work to weed 30 acres of organic onions. Also, the average farm makes 91,800 dollars a year and spends 28 percent of that on chemicals, fertilizers, and seeds and the labor constitutes 13 percent of that but with the laser weeders farmers could save more money.