To reverse the declining numbers of young Canadian farmers, Halifax-based Nexus Robotics is developing a weed-picking robot that makes the physical farm labour less grueling.
“Picking weeds sucks,” said Teric Greenan, the founder of Nexus. “It never ends. You can be as proactive as you want about it, but there are always going to be weeds next week, next month, next year. And no young person wants to get into an industry where you have to work your ass off for next to no pay, there is a reason we’re turning away from it.”
In Canada, there are more farmers over the age of 55 than those under 35, according to Statistics Canada. And “that’s just an industry waiting to collapse,” said Greenan who is a part of this declining population.
The 25-year-old runs a farm in Lunenburg called Abundance Cooperative and it was there that Greenan, a former electrical engineering student at St. Francis Xavier University, had the idea for a robot than can identify and remove stubborn weeds.
So in October 2016, he approached Thomas Trappenberg, a professor with Dalhousie University's Faculty of Computer Science, to figure out how to build this robot. Since then Greenan has partnered with a team of four developers and researchers to construct the weed-picking bot, and they’ve been gaining good traction.
The team has received about $150,000 in funding from such organizations as Innovacorp, through its Spark Innovation Challenge and Cleantech accelerator, and the National Research Council. They have built the initial prototype of the machine. What’s next is developing the software for the visual recognition, machine learning system that will ensure that the robot knows exactly what is and is not a weed.
“That’s really the innovative part of our system,” said Greenan.
Nexus plans to have the final prototype ready within the next six months to demo for large-scale farmers here in Canada. Ideally, Greenan says he’d like to tackle the North American markets first. In Atlantic Canada, he has identified a large problem with a weed called Lamb's Quarter, a pesky plant common on the potato farms in Prince Edward Island.
A big issue in modern farming is that weeds have become resistant to traditional herbicides, forcing farmers to resort back to old fashioned weed-pullin’ to deal with their unwanted sprouts.
“Technology is the solution to that,” said Greenan. “It’s not going to go back to people in the field with hoes.”
Greenan says his robot would be able to work twice as fast as a person and would also work overnight, giving farmers back their time to plot, plan and plant crops.
The robot, which has been built, taken apart, and re-assembled twice now, will have the advanced software installed within the next couple months.
Greenan says he is open to testing the robot at his farm in Lunenburg. But he needs to be absolutely confident in the bot's functionality before testing it on any of the crops and, more importantly, before demoing for potential early adopters.
“I just want to make farming better for farmers, that’s my goal.”
