For the past three years, Terry Aberhart has watched the spindly, fixed-wing drones zip across the big skies above his farm in Canada’s Saskatchewan province, testing a technology that could be the future of weeding.
Fitted with an artificial intelligence system, the drones are designed by local startup Precision AI to spot, identify and kill the weeds without drenching the entire crop in chemicals.
"I’m on the list for one of the first machines when they become available,” says Aberhart, a sustainable farming enthusiast. "The current technology is designed for maximum coverage and to hit everything in the field.”