CHENEY, Kan. (AP) — For years, Kansas farmer Clint Bauer has struggled with keeping weeds out of his row crops. Along with keeping living roots in the ground, organic practices and no-till methods, he tried crimping — but the pigweeds just grew taller.
Three years ago, Bauer, an ex-California-based executive who farms in Haven and Cheney, decided to implement a wild plan, using robots to behead weeds.
“I realized there was no great way to get the weeds out at scale without chemicals,” Bauer said. “I needed to invent one.”
He started Greenfield Robotics.
Before chemicals replaced them, workers pulled weeds from the farm. Greenfield Robotics puts the “workers” back in the field with a new kind of worker — a mechanized one, The Hutchinson News reports.
“We want to control weeds with labor and make it robot labor,” Bauer said. “Robotics is our way of putting (mechanized) labor back into the farm.”
The challenge for Bauer was he felt regenerative farming did not work for large fields without the heavy use of agrichemicals.
“I came up with the idea for it (a robot) and tested it manually,” Bauer said. “No one knew if it would work. It has to fit between rows.”
Bauer started up his company, Greenfield Robotics, on one of his family farms in Cheney in 2018. He currently uses the weeding bots running on other farmers’ soybean crops in Harper, Reno, Rice and Sedgwick counties in central Kansas.
Along with soybean crops, Bauer hopes to work with sorghum, cotton and possibly canola farmers.
There is slightly under 90 million acres of soybeans planted across the U.S. this year, according to the USDA. During 2020, Kansas ranked seventh in soybeans planted, with more than 5,000 acres. The Sunflower State follows Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Indiana and Missouri in soybean acreage.
“Our mission was always to get the chemicals out of farming,” Bauer said. “There is no resistance to the spinning blade.”
The robots, which travel from 1 to 3 mph, are water-resistant and weigh about 200 pounds. As they move between the crop rows, they cut down the weeds with their blades, leaving the chopped-up debris in their wake.
Although they are programed to stay in their lane, someone is monitoring them on a computer screen at all times.
Both Bauer and Jerry Poole, the company’s president and CEO, grew up in Kansas. Bauer helped his father tend to their crops and cattle in Haven. Poole, who grew up in southeastern Kansas, spent time on his grandfather’s hog and cattle ranch in Oklahoma.
