Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Easier way to weed vegetables?

Back to Leopold Letter Fall 2010

By MARY ADAMS, Policy and outreach coordinator

Weeding isn’t the favorite activity of most home gardeners, but it is manageable. A producer who wants to grow vegetables in commercially viable quantities, however, may see weeding as a major business challenge that gobbles up time and energy. Two Iowa State University agricultural and biosystems engineering professors are looking at mechanized solutions to help farmers remove weeds from their vegetable crops with greater ease.

Lie Tang and Brian Steward are beginning their second year of work on “An Automated Mechanical Intra-row Weed Removal System for Vegetable Crops,” a project funded by the Leopold Center’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative.

The engineers started by talking with several Iowa vegetable growers to better understand what design criteria should be emphasized in the process. They also reviewed the literature to determine the state of engineering science in mechanical and automated weeding technology. Two ISU graduate students worked to develop the two primary technical components of the proposed automated mechanical intra-row weed removal system: the weed sensing system and the mechanical actuation system. The major early hurdles for the researchers were finding the appropriate electric motors and linear drives and developing software for the machine’s operations.

This year, they will finish construction of the mechanical actuation system and perform field experiments to determine the power and speed requirements of the rotary weeding tool and linear drive as well as weed control success. This experimental data will help them determine how the system can be used most effectively in the field and provide operational guidelines for users. The researchers want to devise systems to help the machine deal with those vegetable crops (e.g., cabbage, kale and broccoli) that have more distinguishable features than weeds.

During the second year of the project, their research team (Tang and Steward, graduate students Ji Li and Mohd Taufik and undergraduate student Andrew Thompson) will develop the system prototype at the Agricultural Automation and Robotics Laboratory in the Agricultural Engineering Department at Iowa State.

They will work with local vegetable growers to collect image samples of vegetable and weed plants and perform field tests. The team plans to travel to the organic vegetable farm operated by Susan Jutz, Leopold Center advisory board member, to test their prototype machine. In addition, they have used the preliminary results to leverage a potential multi-state grant proposal for the USDA Specialty Crop Research Initiative program.
 

 

Back to Leopold Letter Fall 2010