Farming Robot Kills 100k Weeds per Hour with Lasers

The year is 2029. Farmers everywhere are confounded by new weed strains which look more and more like the crops they intermingle with, hiding more perfectly among the plants every year.

Then someone had the idea to not vaporize a small percentage of the most conspicuous, ugly weeds, so they'd survive into the next year, crossbreeding with the stealth strains and keeping the weeds from getting too stealthy.

The End.

Might not be so bad even if that solution doesn't work. We got oats and rye out of it last time around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry

Thank you for sharing that. What a surprising thing to learn!

Alternative ending:

Instead of weeding based on the looks of the plans a new company UpRound has developed a chemical solution that can target the weeds without relying on sight, instead it chemically targets all plants other than the crops themselves.

Does anyone make a handheld version of this for home use?

actual *real* lasers ?