By: Jingwei Zhao

Farmers use weed sprayers not just on weeds, but on all their crops in the fields! Can you believe that? Most of the natural food you eat contains all sorts of different chemicals for those weed sprayers. However, the massive farming company John Deere has recently come up with much more advanced weed-spraying technology.

36 cameras inside of the weed spray canisters quickly scan what is a crop and what is a weed. Deanna Kovar, vice president of Production and Precision Agriculture Production Systems at the company, says, “Our system is capturing two million pixels per second, so it is seeing and processing a lot.” However, John Deere isn’t the only company that is improving the farming system.

As of now, the John Deere system is only limited to three crops- corn, soybeans, and cotton, but there are many other farming giants that rival each other all over the world, and one of them is the German company Bosch BASF Smart Farming. Their weeder is called the “Smart Spraying Solution.” However, Nadav Bocher has a different idea. As the chief executive and co-founder of Israeli firm Greeneye Technology, he focuses on how much the excessive use of herbicide is damaging the crops, not just the weeds. According to him, “With such a high level of soil pollution created for no reason, that goes back to us as consumers, and hurts the entire ecosystem.”

Despite how expensive developing this technology was Mr. Bocher says that the profits his company makes will be able to make back the money in less than two seasons! Daniel McCann, the leader of the company Precision AI, says, “AI is such a steep change in farming’s evolution, it’s like moving from ox to tractor.” He is another member of one of those farming companies that are currently investing in AI. However, he has improved the system by using drones to laser down the weeds once they are detected. With all this innovation in farming, we are sure to finally get natural, chemical-free crops!