[aidos]

I have countless weeks / months experience in dealing with manual weed removal. At times when I was younger I spent 14+ hours a day out in the field destroying weeds with a hand hoe.

One of the main crops I was doing it for was squash. The squash plant is pretty broad and the hand hoe allowed you to get close in under the plant. That's something this technique couldn't handle.

As someone working on minimum wage, I could get through a pretty large area in a day. Sometimes there would half a dozen of us in a gang. I'm not sure how much a device like this would eventually cost but I suspect for the same money you could buy a lot of minimum wage manual labour.

Either way, cool prototype!

[fanquake]

There's a research project being done on the viability of hand picking radish plants out of wheat and lupin crops on broadacre farms here in Western Australia. Some farmers already do it, but once the results come out, I'm wondering home many more will start.