Food production ……. As the human population grows ever larger, the pressure on land resources increases and food production will need to be more efficient. The 'Elephant in the Room' is MEAT. I'm not a vegetarian, but eating meat protein is incredibly inefficient compared to vegetable protein. Current levels of world meat consumption are very possibly not sustainable and certainly not necessary - we do not need to eat meat every day.

So what's this got to do with the WEEDINATOR? …… The machine is designed to increase vegetable / cereal production efficiency and enable small farms to compete with larger ones using more traditional 'monster' tractors. 

So what's wrong with 'monster' tractors? ……. Cereal crops, particularly, are often grown on huge fields where extremely large machines can work without too many corners and turns and driving between fields. One person is employed to drive the machine and he and the machine can work incredibly efficiently, producing very cheap food. The downside is that all other lifeforms except the human being and the crop are pretty much destroyed, including bacteria and other lifeforms in the soil itself. This is considered to be bad for the environment.

Why is meat production an inefficient way of producing protein? ……… In these time (2018), meat animals are often kept in massive sheds where the animal hardly ever sees natural sunlight. Apart from the very dubious ethical considerations, the animals are fed those cereal crops that could otherwise be eaten directly by us humans. The cost in terms of loss of efficiency is massive - somewhere in the order of 90 % of the food value of the cereal is lost and wasted in the process of feeding it to animals. Even animals grazing out on open fields are a loss in efficiency - probably even greater than those kept in sheds - as that land could possibly be used to produce food crops for humans rather than food crops for animals.

The WEEDINATOR, and other similar machines, enable the farmer to have smaller fields or break up the mono crop on large fields with areas beneficial to wildlife. Part of the idea is to use zero pesticides, so there would need to be a balanced environment with enough natural predators to keep the caterpillars / aphids under an acceptable level of control without having to completely destroy that caterpillar or completely exclude the predator.

Wildlife also lives inside the soil itself and can, again, maintain a natural balance between friends and foe and also nutrients. Bacteria / fungus in the soil can produce, for example , nitrates if the soil's health is maintained. Much of the soil's biodiversity lives in the top 3" and ploughing or other heavy cultivation can destroy soil health drastically. Whilst I'm not personally against ploughing, the opportunity to reduce heavy cultivation by using a precision machine such as the WEEDINATOR is very exciting! This kind of machine can target weeds on the surface or limit it's effect on the soil to the top 1". 

Machines such as the WEEDINATOR are agile enough to navigate between areas set aside for rejuvenation of soil structure or proliferation of wildlife and literally have a very light 'touch' on the soil. There's no wheel compaction of the soil due to heavy machines and they may well be even more efficient than monster tractors due to not needing a driver, pesticides and less need for artificial fertilisers such as nitrates. In theory, all artificial fertilisers could be negated and ….. get this ….. all animal manure could also be negated so that the whole system gets rid the reliance for inefficient animal meat production.

The WEEDINATOR et al offer new and exciting ways of producing food where a total 'no fertiliser import' regime can be created, which means no artificial chemical fertiliser or animal manure brought on to the farm ….. AND ……. The farm itself has no, or very few, animals. This regime would be achieved by using ultra precision machines which preserve a natural soil health and using new crop / fallow rotation cycles to maintain nutrient levels in a more natural way.