One of Scandinavia's largest organic vegetable growers has been weeding onions, beans and leaf celery this season with no one in the driving seat. Axel Månsson, whose company Axel Månsson A/S manages 3,000 hectares in Jutland, Denmark — 1,400 of them vegetables and 800 organic — bought an AgXeed T2 7-SERIES autonomous tractor in April and paired it with a Carbon Robotics LaserWeeder. After several months he rates the system four and a half stars on most counts and five for overall value.

"Manpower is very expensive in Denmark," Månsson says, and labour is the biggest saving he sees. He estimates that in a concentrated block of fields one person could manage a fleet of five of the machines. Diesel use is "much cheaper" than with a conventional tractor, and he expects implement wear to fall because the robot drives at a steady, correct speed every pass.

The two machines talk to each other. The LaserWeeder, which can fire 7,000 shots a minute, tells the 230-hp tractor to slow down where weed pressure is high and to speed up where it is low, keeping ground speed between 0.4 and 1.8 km/h. A human driver, Månsson points out, cannot read live weed-density data and adjust speed to it patch by patch; the pairing does it automatically for as long as the job runs.

Setting up was easier than expected on a farm already running several new technologies. The team used its existing GPS field maps to define boundaries and routes, and the field managers monitor the machine remotely, including from a phone. Safety stops trigger if a person or animal comes too close. Moving between fields is the one task that still needs a person, and the driver of a manned tractor on the same farm does it when required.

Overnight work is one of the most practical features. "We go home at six o'clock at night, and we instruct the AgXeed for example to be finished with 28 hectares by the next morning," Månsson says. Route planning is done in advance in TraXwise, down to individual fields with different bed widths, and the routes can be passed to the John Deere Operations Center used for the farm's manned tractors.

Capacity is currently limited more by the logistics of moving between fields than by the machine, and the farm does not yet have enough laser-weeding capacity to cover all its organic area, so hand weeding continues alongside. Wider belt tracks are being fitted to open up more cultivating work with a 6-metre toolbar.

There have been no breakdowns since April, and service has been quick when called. Asked whether he would buy the machine again, Månsson does not hesitate: "Yes, sure." He is careful, though, to add "until now — it's still quite new", and notes that the technology is developing fast enough that another autonomous tractor may one day do the same job.

Source: Future Farming