Experience with the Farmdroid FD20 field robot: Sowing and in-row weeding of sugar beet

Summary

In this Video, Daniel and David Vetterli are using the Farmdroid field robot for the first time to sow sugar beet. Two of these machines from Denmark are in active use in Switzerland. Their purpose is to reduce manual labour for hoeing in sugar beet.
Normally, organic farmers need 100-150 hours of manual labour for this task. That’s why they are looking for a better method.
This robot records the coordinates of each individual sugar beet plant at sowing.
Thanks to the fact that the machine can record the plants’ coordinates, it is able, as a next step, to proceed with in-row weeding, i.e. weeding between the individual sugar beet plants.
Their conclusions are: This technology does indeed meet the demands they place on it. But there are still a number of teething problems. The supervisory demands are still too high. There are still too many disruptions. However, the farmers are very confident overall that this is a technology with a promising future.