Monday, December 2, 2019
Interview with Clint Brauer, Greenfield Robotics
How do you reduce or eliminate the huge amount of chemicals farmers need today in farming for crops such as corn, soybean, or milo -- and help overcome the growing resistance of weeds to those chemicals? Greenfield Robotics (greenfieldrobotics.com), is a startup, split between Los Angeles and Kanasas, which is working on robotic systems which make it possible for farmers to remove their reliance on chemical sprays and tilling. We caught up with founder and CEO Clint Brauer, a former executive from LA's technology industry who went home to Kansas to get back into farming, to learn more about how robotics can be applied to agriculture.
What is Greenfield Robotics?
Clint Brauer: Greenfield Robotics was started to solve the problem with broad acre farming, which is the chemical problem. We eliminate the chemical resistance problem with weeds and the tillage problem, allowing farmers to control weeds in a large field, whether that's a field of corn, soybean,or milo, without use of chemicals and without tilling.
For those who aren't that familiar with farming, why is this important?
Clint Brauer: There are a couple of things going on. Close to forty percent of the United States is using conservation tillage, of which no-till is the most popular, which means they don't plow, disk, or don't disrupt the soil. They don't turn it over. They don't disrupt the soil and turn it upside down to control weeks. This trend started in the 1970's. Starting in the 1970's, and now there are around 40 percent of the farmers in the United States using no-till. The other 60 percent are mostly doing tilling, which is ripping and turning over the soil. We can work with both parties. The guys For farmers that till, the challenge is it leads to soil erosion. When rain comes down onto tilled, bare soil, and when that rain comes down and hits it hard, it takes a lot of the soil with it, into waterways, and creates water pollution. That's why farmers have gone to no-till farming, because you can store five times the amount of rainwater per cubic foot of soil, and there are many other benefits to no-till. The issue, however, is weeds. When you till, you automatically kill weeds, by knocking them over and ripping them apart and disrupt the roots. The problem with no-till, is the way you control weeks is with sprays and chemicals, and in particular, glyphosate, more commonly known as Roundup. At first, that worked great, using glyphosate. But, after a time, broadleaf weeds have become resistant to glyphosate and now even more powerful and expensive chemicals. With that, farmers are losing control of their fields while expenses rise. They then have two choices, which is to go back to tilling, which no one wants to do, or they can start working with our system.
To tell us about how robotics is used in the system?
Clint Brauer: We did something different, is we came up with a small, robotic swarm approach. We'll show up at a field in spring, and we'll have about ten of these robots, put them in a field, and they will drive themselves between the rows of crops, and maintain the weeds between the row. They're small—about 100 pounds—and battery driven, and no fossil fuels are involved beyond the charging. Because of the size and weight, they stay on top of the soil, even if it's really muddy. It's the opposite of what's been going on in farming for the last hundred years, where equipment keeps on getting bigger. We're doing things in the other direction. As the climate continues to shift and deteriorate, we're seeing both a lot of drought and muddiness, and having a smaller footprint is a huge advantage.
Is this something farmers would buy, or is this a service?
Clint Brauer: Getting farmers to buy anything is an exercise in futility. It's a really terrible time for broadacre farming. So, this is robotics-as-a-service, and we've set it up to be something they can swap on their operating loan belt, so that all farmers can have access. We're not asking them to spend any more money or finance this, but to buy it as robotics-as-a-service. We've set it up so that saves them money compared to investing in GMO seeds, chemical sprays and seed and the monster machines that they use to spray those chemicals—we just replace that cost.
With the amount of technology required for robots, how does the cost of this compare with those chemical treatments?
Clint Brauer: The way this came about, is I lost control of a couple of fields with chemicals. The problem today, is that the chemicals that we have been using since I got back into farming a decade ago are now starting to fail. One example, is pigweed. When it gets to about a foot tall, it start growing about 3 inches a day. If you let it go unchecked, it can get to four to five feet tall, and the bottom of the base of it is 3 inches thick, like a small tree. That's a nightmare in a field, especially for a crop like soybeams, where soybeans maybe get 1.5 to 3 feet tall. Right now, when that pgweed gets to a foot tall, it becomes resistant to all of the sprays. They release a new chemical, but those weeds soon become resistant, and that seems to be accelerating. In the state of Kansas, pigweed became resistant to the latest chemical, Dicamba, in less than a year after the release of the chemical. That means you have a high risk of losing control of your fields. The second that which is changing, is some of those new sprays are drifting, and they are extremely toxic to plants that don't have the genetic traits bred into them to resist those sprays. For Dicamba, you have to have the Dicamba trait in the soybean seed that you buy. If you spray Dicamba, and it drifts to an adjoining field, it kills the crop. That's ecome pretty common. That's why, for example, in the state of Arkansas, as of May 25th, you can't spray Dicamba. For soybeans, where you harvest in September, you can only pray that you can get through the summer without spraying chemicals. Other states are passing similar laws, because they don't want that drift spray to kill the crops of other partners, and there have been lots of lawsuits, and even one death, which is crazy.
Let's talk a bit about your background, for those who aren't familiar with your background in the technology here in LA. How did you end up in farming from technology?
Clint Brauer: I moved to LA after college. I grew up on a farm, and both sides of my family had farms. I learned how to drive a combine when I was a kid, and was driving a combine by eight or nine years old harvesting wheat. I went to college at K-State, and then I started with a little Internet development company, W3 Design, which became USWeb Los Angeles. I ended up doing a lot of different things, and was an executive at Sony, and had lots of software and marketing roles over time. I did that for thirteen years, and about ten years ago, decided to move back to Kansas. I had just gone through a divorce, and was thinking about what I really wanted to do, and decided after some thought that driving chemicals out of farming would be my ambition. I had a small family farm, which needed some repair, and began growing vegetables using organic methods.organically. That's organic even beyond the standards, there are things which are in the OMRI Certifications that we don't allow. We ended up in the greenhouse business, and then started another greenhouse operation, and ended up in distribution for other small farms to grocery stores and schools, and teaching and helping others in farming. For example, the person who is managing our farm right now has been training for the last two to three one year, and has already bought some land to start her own operation. That has all been for vegetables. I though that, it was about time to do that in the big fields, and Then I focused on broadacre crops, which instead of talking about thousands of square feet in a greenhouse, we're talking acres and hundreds of acres, if not thousands of acres. We wanted to take what we learned in the greenhouse, and vegetables, and apply that out in the fields. I had a pretty good idea on how to do that, but couldn't figure out how to deal with weeds without tilling or spraying chemicals. That was where this company came from. An old friend of mine, who had been part of W3 Design and USWeb, and has been writing machine vision software for a decade called RoboRealm, which has 60,000 users, eventually joined our company, along with our VP of Hardware, Carl Sutter, who is in Long Beach, and that's how we got here. We're on year two now.
How far along are you now with the product?
Clint Brauer: We have our machines now working in the field. We have had about four of them working all of this summer, mostly running in my own fields, maintaining some soybeams. We initially ran them them with radio control and also someone walking behind them, and we've now then wrote written our own tiller operations teleoperations software, connected them to a local area wireless control network, so we can sit somewhere else—preferably, air conditioned--and drive those bots remotely. We also started adding simple autonomy, such as automated steering, and we have now added GPS, and we're now adding machine vision and starting with row recognition. We already have the software written to recognize rows, and tests are going on actively. In the Spring, we'll be on fifteen fields in this area, and we'll be maintaining soybean, corn, and milo through the summer.
What's next for the company, and what are you working on next?
Clint Brauer: You sometimes start out with one problem, and you realize that you are in a position to solve a lot of big problems. As it turns out, everything we make a bot for is to solve a problem on my own farm which needed solving. As it turns out, there are about four other bots we want to develop, which are all in various stages, mostly in my mind and where I've started talking with the engineers. Those bots, when we put them all together, can completely change farming. It won't be an overnight process, but it will basically enable what is called regenerative farming, and allow it to scale. Right now, there is a serious problem trying to scale regenerative agriculture, which means not tilling any soil and basically do things to the soil to build it up, and get away from adding synthetic fertilizer, and getting away from any chemicals you can over time. Right now, Regenerative agriculture is completely dependent on herbicides, and depending on sweat equity. We think that robotics can actually increase the cropland where corn, soybeam, milo, can be planted. That's our big vision, which is taking a lot of what we're doing manually on the farm today, and figuring out how to do it with robotics.
Thanks, and good luck!