Why This Robot Kills Weeds With Lasers

Right now, you and I are living through one of  the most pivotal moments in food history and most people have no idea that it's happening.  Like this massive machine is burning weeds with lasers so that farmers don't need to use  as many herbicides. And this cute little robot is breaking up chunks inside a huge grain bin so  that farmers don't get hurt.

And this tractor is driving itself with me inside. All of this cool  new tech is part of what experts are calling the "Fourth Agricultural Revolution" and it's  here because we're facing a big problem: The world's population is exploding. By 2050 experts  say we'll need to increase food output by more than 50% to catch up with current population  and feed those new people and we've got to do it in ways that actually protect the Earth  long term.

Right now, farmers are in a fight to feed the world. So let me show you some  of the coolest machines they're using to do that. "Farming is changing.

. . " "New ways of farming.

. . " "New ways of farming!

" "This is the laser weeder. . .

" "It kills the weeds with lasers! " "There is no one in that tractor, I just started it with my phone! " We need a lot more food, fast.

12,000 years ago, all the humans alive were about half the population of New York City  today. Then 2,000 years ago there were still only about 230 million people but then. .

. now we  have 8. 1 billion people living on the planet and we'll hit 9 billion in just 12 years.

That's a  lot of people! Growth has already slowed so experts say we'll peak at 10. 3 billion in 2084.

But all  those new people need to eat. The amount of land used to grow food per person has plummeted because  humans have gotten a lot better at farming and a big part of that is thanks to the tools they use to do it and I'm on my way to see some of them up close. .

. This is a waiver that says I  assume full responsibility for any risk of bodily injury death or property  damage. .

. I'm signing my life away because they're going to let me drive all of these.  I'm headed to a secret test farm where some of the coolest new farm equipment  gets put to use for the very first time.

. . The reason why I wanted to visit John Deere  specifically is because their tech matters a lot for the future of your in my food.

They make a  huge share of large- scale agricultural equipment worldwide and many people love what they make  but they're not without their controversy. To many farmers today, John Deere represents some  of the most difficult issues in farming like a lack of control and high prices and a general  concern about what increasing automation means for jobs and workers. So this company really  embodies our story: This is exciting tech that might help feed the world and also comes with a  lot of challenges that aren't likely to go away as we rely more on technology for the food we  need.

This is what makes this story so important and why getting this right is so "huge if true. "  Growing food didn't always look so high-tech. the biggest change happened all the way back  here when we stopped foraging and invented farming.

The First Agricultural Revolution was  the seed of modern civilization but thousands of years later that civilization was way bigger  so farming industrialized. The Second Agricultural Revolution meant farming became big business but  as the population grew so did hunger worldwide. Parts of the world were on the brink of famine.

The  Third Agricultural Revolution aimed to solve that problem. Between 1950 and 1970, farmers invented all  kinds of new chemicals to keep away pests and weeds and focused their resources on one plant per field  year after year called "monocropping. " It saved a lot of lives and ended a lot of suffering but it came  at a cost.

The invention of monocropping is great for growing a lot of food but over time it hurts  the soil making it harder to grow food in the future. Those pesticides and herbicides that make  monocropping possible also cause a lot of health problems in people and in other animals that  are crucial for natural stability not to mention the strain on water resources that comes from  modern farming. So how do we feed 2 billion more people and solve the problems that our previous  solution caused?

Experts say the answer is in five steps. Step one: Freeze how much land we use. For  basically all of human history when we needed more food one answer was cut down trees make more Farms  to grow crops for humans to eat we've already cleared an area the size of South America.

We can't  do that anymore. Nearly all the new food for those 2 billion new people will need to come from the  land we've got. So step two: Grow more on that land.

But how exactly? One controversial option is to  farm like we're farming now but faster which means robots. Farm robots are controversial because  a huge number of people rely on farm work and too often those people are already underpaid and  mistreated and to make matters more complicated at the same time there are also shortages  of certain farm labor and facing our growing population these robots might really help to  make sure more people can eat by increasing how fast farm work can happen and in what  kinds of weather and at what kinds of day.

This topic is just extremely complicated.  Robots are already doing things that just a few years ago people said were impossible  like picking soft fruits which up until now required a human hand. These robots are really  cool but they won't feed 2 billion more people.

To do that, you need to take the big machines  that farmers currently rely on and make them smarter. All these mega machines help  grow your food. The process starts by tilling the soil to break it all up then  planting the seeds the perfect depth and distance apart with some machines able  to plant up to 720 seeds per second then nurturing those little baby plants by  spraying them with water and nutrients and pesticides and finally ruthlessly cutting  them down so that you can eat them the first two contraptions are pulled by a tractor  like this one but this tractor can drive itself.

Do I just press that? "Just push  that. " I just the yellow button.

Ready? Set. .

. There's no one in that  tractor, I just started it with my phone! But hang on, while this tractor is  driving itself, let me tell you about how we make our videos.

Our Huge If True team works  in four different cities so it's tricky to share our huge amounts of footage between us.  Plus we have a lot of video drafts. .

. a lot. .

. so to share it all between us we use Drpbox.  I've been using Drpbox for years for all of my videos which is why I'm so excited that  they're sponsoring this one.

It's not just that it's easy to send big files, it's also easy for  us to collaborate and leave feedback and share ideas. We can easily share big video files with our  team and make sure that the right people have the right access to the right video file at the right  time using Drpbox's password permissions plus we can set expiration dates on certain files and  disable downloads. With Drpbox Replay we can share video feedback between ourselves in real time.

We  can leave each other frame specific timestamped comments with markups which is awesome because it  saves us a lot of back and forth and when we're done we just hit share. And even if someone we're  working with doesn't have a Drpbox account they can still send and receive documents for feedback.  It's quick and easy to transfer files to them from anywhere.

This footage that I'm shooting right  now is going to be uploaded to Drpbox as soon as I leave and then transcribed and scripted and  commented on and edited all before you see it. So thank you Drpbox. If you want to try Drpbox for  your team click the link in the description to learn more.

Now back to the story: Okay time to see  what a self-driving tractor looks like from the inside. Oh this is wild. It's got a whole plan.

I  don't need to do anything. I'm just going to sit here and it has a whole plan of how it's going  to till this field. Just going to channel Ryan Trahan in a Tesla right now, that's the vibe.

Sitting  in a moving tractor while no one is touching the wheel was wild. It was following the route that  we gave it, it was avoiding other vehicles on the farm, it felt so futuristic. It felt like I was a  cat sitting on top of a Roomba, you know what I mean?

For the farmers in the audience, you might be  thinking, yeah but self-driving tractors have been around for a while, but that tech is getting  better and easier to use. In theory, you could have one farmer running a bunch of Farm Roombas  just on their phone and they can create these detailed routes to hit every part of a field  using precise GPS. "You can see that yellow dome on the roof of the cab there?

We can position  that dome on the top of the roof and the one on the Implement to within 1 in of where it's  actually located. " This technology is unlocking what's called "precision agriculture," letting AI  and ultra-precise GPS generate a path around the field. "We create a full field path plan of  how to most efficiently navigate that field.

" That means more food because farmers can reduce  dead spots, pieces of the field that are missed because of poor route planning, and overlap, areas  of the field that get hit twice and overuse resources. Tractors with better self-driving  tech let Farmers optimize their routes and maximize their output all while avoiding humans  and obstacles using cameras and sensors. These new forms of optimization are great for doing this. 

But once you've tilled the field, you still need to get the seeds in the ground. "This is a high-speed  planter. We plant at roughly 10 mph.

That's fast for planting. This is where our seed is held. "  Seeds in here, goes through each of these, down to each row unit.

This machine takes a seed from the  large container at the top and sucks it through a bunch of different hoses into a seed bowl for  planting. "This is our seed bowl and if you were to look at this while it was actually operating,  you would have a seed everywhere there's a hole. " Oh wow.

"We can actually look at it. . .

" WOAH! Seeds are taken up one by one into a belt brush, scanned with a sensor dropped into the  ground, and then recorded with the camera and a laser to make sure it's planted just right. That  whole process of hoses and vacuums and holders and sensors and cameras is all happening within  a fraction of a second across thousands of seeds while barreling across a field at 10 mph.

The  machine gives farmers extremely precise control so they can decide how far apart each seed is  so the plants don't compete with each other for resources and how deep they get planted so they  know that they'll get enough moisture. "If we can get every one of these seeds to turn into a  plant and come out of the ground at the same time it can help us increase the yield of a crop  by up to 20%. " Wow.

The engineering and the science that goes into these machines is just wild. I  find this so cool. And it's about to get even crazier because I'm going to get to drive the  biggest and most advanced machine that they have.

This is "See and Spray," 120-ft wide, 18 ton  beast. This huge machine is part of step three to feed the world: Use resources more  wisely. This is the one I'm most excited about.

"This is nurturing the crops, applying  fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, any number of inputs. " This tech is helping reduce herbicide  use dramatically and some versions get rid of it completely. "The reason this one is really  exciting is because we are able to spot a weed and detect that that's a weed versus a plant.

Ao  as the farmer is driving through the field, this machine will cover the rate of about I would  say the average size of an American house every second. " So it's looking down at the ground. . 

"That's correct" And it's using computer vision to visualize the ground below it. . .

"It is processing  through Nvidia GPUs to decide faster than you can blink your eye what is a weed and what is  a plant and then it takes action on that. Until recently, these machines just sprayed the whole  field with herbicides but now this machine can use cameras right here connected to computers  right here that use machine learning to create a map of millions of crops on a field, visually  identify weeds that don't belong, and then spray them with just a tiny little squirt of herbicide,  reducing the amount of chemicals they use on these fields dramatically. And what better  way to see this tech in action than to drive it.

My inner 12-year-old was  so happy driving this machine. I obviously wanted to see how fast I  could go. I'm going to floor it.

. . ready.

. . [ANGRY VROOM] Turns out it can go 15 mph which might  not sound so fast but let me tell you driving an 18 ton vehicle going 15 miles an hour felt  like speeding across the field in a tank.

Even at those speeds though, the cameras  were able to identify all of the weeds in red and spray them. That's pretty good. "That's  enough excitement.

" They even let me fold the 120-ft arms. But my favorite versions of these  machines don't use chemicals at all. They use lasers.

A bunch of companies have already made  tools that can do this. And then there's the brute force option. You can literally just BOOP the  weeds by using the same kind of visual recognition system and then physical force to destroy them. 

Precision tech can broadly help us use fewer chemicals less fertilizer and also less water to  grow the huge volume of food that we're about to need. But I think the coolest thing is what it  could do if you play this out a few years. The reason that we do monocropping and use herbicides  is that it's the way that farmers figured out how to feed the world.

But if you could actually  increase yield using a system that knows every plant on the field and what it needs, you could  in theory plant many different kinds of plants in the same field which ironically is an older  form of farming called "intercropping" which keeps the soil healthy that we could bring back using  new tech like machine learning. The truth is right now we don't have enough food to feed all of the  people that are going to need to eat. This Fourth Agricultural Revolution is trying to change that  and we're going to need technology to help get us there.

But along the way there are big challenges.  They're similar in lots of industries right now: As we rely more on technology, how does that change  what jobs exist? And for the jobs that do exist how does it change what they actually look like?

For  example, farmer say that companies are making it harder to repair and maintain equipment and they  want the freedom to be able to do that themselves. That's called the "right to repair. " Farmers recently  won this from John Deere and you might have seen similar headlines about cars and phones.

As our  world gets more high-tech, these fights are going to continue. But we have to figure this out. We  have a long way to go to feed 10 billion people total.

The final two steps might be particularly  hard, because they might require us to change. Step four is shifting our diets. Only 55% of the world's  crop calories feed people.

The rest feed livestock that might feed people but much less efficiently.  And finally, step five is cutting down on how much food we don't eat. Roughly 25% of the world's total  food calories are lost or wasted before they're consumed.

Together, these steps could help us feed  everyone and not just feed them but feed them well. Humans are amazing. We found ways to feed the world  at a scale that was previously unimaginable and now we'll continue to improve how we grow what we  eat because the lives of 10 billion people rely on it.

This video is part of Huge If True, our optimistic series about science and technology and the futures that we can build  together. We make this show because we believe that by imagining these better futures we make  them more likely to come true. If you're into that, the best thing that you can do to support  us is to subscribe.

See you for the next one. . .