AI-powered weed-killing robots shift market of chemical herbicides: Bloomberg

NEW YORK, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) — After almost a century of deploying a more-is-more approach to chemical herbicides, the global agricultural sector is rapidly rolling out artificial-intelligence (AI) advancements that promise to curb the use of weed-control sprays by as much as 90 percent, reported Bloomberg News on Tuesday.
Using AI-powered cameras, the new sprayers can identify and target invasive plants while avoiding the cash crops, said the report, noting that if even a fraction of growers adopt the new tools, it could mean a big shift for a market valued at 37 billion U.S. dollars.
“Though they don’t widely acknowledge it, they realize selling millions of gallons of product is a blunt and fading model,” Jason Miner, global head of agriculture at Bloomberg Intelligence, was quoted as saying of the herbicide industry.
Crop protection is a big business, valued at about 79 billion dollars in 2022, according to S&P Global, with herbicides comprising almost half of the overall market.
In the United States, weed killers are used on 96 percent of planted corn acres, compared to 19 percent of fields that are treated with fungicides and 14 percent with insecticides, according to a 2021 U.S. Department of Agriculture survey. ■