Time now to go ahead of the curve with Clint Brauer, the co-founder of Greenfield Robotics. Brauer’s goal with the autonomous bots is to find a safer, chemical-free solution for weed control. And he says the bots, which are also capable of nutrient microspraying, are perfect for no-till and strip-till systems.

“I’ve been building tech for a very long time. My co-founder has been doing machine vision for 35 years. So, we know a lot. And sensors are something waiting to break. Believe it or not, as a robotics company, we try to not use sensors wherever we can. Our system doesn’t identify each plant; it doesn’t need to. We identify the rows. The current robots run between the rows and get as much as they can between the rows, and that’s it, and they have to move at a high speed to do that. The way that we’re fixing the in-row problem is this next robot that basically mulches the cover crop and injects the seed into the mulch. There is no need for hyper-precision identification of every single weed. We simply don’t care. For a strip-till situation, for contextual awareness here, what we like to see is you strip-till into the cover crop and we just maintain the cover crop in between rows, we’d love to do as much of that as possible, especially if moisture isn’t a problem.”

The Greenfield bots are running in 11 different states. They’re currently sold out for 2026, but Brauer expects the technology to be more mainstream and more widely available within the next 18 months. Catch our full conversation on No-TillFarmer.com.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.