A robot that removes weeds, and a new fertilizer that can help farmers reduce up to one-quarter of their fertilizer use were on Tuesday last week unveiled by the Council of Agriculture’s Tea Research and Extension Station.
Tea and coffee are listed as important cash crops in Taiwan, and the inventions would cut labor costs and promote ecological balance, the station told a news conference in Taipei.
Station director Su Tsung-chen (蘇宗振) said that weeding accounts for 30 percent of the total cost of managing a tea farm, and that most farms usually have to hire workers to complete the job.
Photo: CNA
It costs about NT$26,000 per hectare annually to weed farms, but that goes go up to about NT$100,000 if it is an organic farm that does not use herbicides, Su said.
The station’s robot uses real-time kinematic positioning technology, which significantly increases the precision of the robot as it moves, minimizing the margin of error to within 10cm, Su said.
The robot moves at a speed of 1kph to 1.5kph, taking four to six hours to finish weeding a hectare of tea, he added.
The robot is also equipped with a small rod which, if it bumps into a tea tree, prompts the robot to lift the weeding machine to prevent damaging the tree roots, Su said.
The research overhead and development for the robot cost about NT$500,000, but with mass manufacturing, the cost could be lowered, Su added.
As the size of coffee plantations in Taiwan have almost doubled from 560 hectares in 2007 to 1,167 hectares last year, the station has worked with Fwusow Industry and the Yunlin County Coffee Production and Sales Center to develop a new type of fertilizer that can be used when plants are budding, flowering and during the two stages of fruition, Su said.
Fwusow would be selling the new fertilizer, he added.
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