Technically, the Danish Farmdroid sowing and weeding robot on solar energy has largely overcome the teething problems, as has been shown last year. In total 1,500 hectares were sown and weeded in Europe. However, the purchase price in combination with the limited sowing capacity is an obstacle to rapid progress.
The German trade magazine Profi, which last spring visited a company where the Farmdroid sowing and weeding robot was active, registered a capacity of 3.4 hectares per day when sowing. According to this journal, deployment on large-scale organic farms is therefore only possible in dry spring, otherwise sowing will take too long.
Salary savings
Organic arable farmer Eberhard Weisskopf from Altenweddingen in East Germany also gained experience with the Farmdroid robot in 2020. He says he has saved no less than 45,000 euros in salary with the investments in two Farmdroid robots. The corona crisis made it impossible to hire Romanians to remove weeds. The Farmdroid company itself states that a payback period of only two years is possible. In addition to drastic wage cost savings, an increase in revenue also helps to achieve this payback period.
A Danish organic arable farm near Copenhagen claims that with the Farmdroid sowing and weeding robot it has increased the yield from 4.7 to 7.6 tons of sugar per hectare. But there are preconditions for achieving this success with the weed robot, it turned out. Manual work is still necessary. Nearly 350 Euro per hectare was invested in manual weed control. In addition, it proved impossible to sow on cropland previously overgrown with weeds. It doesn’t hurt to let the robot do its work very close to the sugar beet plants. The robot has made 6-7 passes last season. In the coming year, the intention is to weed the field before the sugar beet seed germinates.
Sowing and weeding robot – Danish innovation
The Farmdroid robot is the world’s first robot that can both sow and weed and is powered by solar energy. The Danish brothers Jens and Kristian Warning first brought the robot to the market in 2019 in collaboration with robot expert Esben Ostergaard. In addition to sugar beets, the sowing and weeding robot is also suitable for the cultivation of onions and rapeseed. The horticultural crops spinach, cauliflower and various flower seeds are also among the possibilities of the Farmdroid.
