Weed-killing drones come for mega farms

For the past three years, Terry Aberhart has watched the spindly, fixed-wing drones zip across the big skies over his farm in Canada’s Saskatchewan province, testing a technology that could be the future of weeding.

Fitted with an artificial intelligence system, the drones are designed by local startup Precision AI to spot, identify and kill weeds without drenching the entire crop in chemicals.

“I’m on the list for one of the first machines when they become available,” Aberhart says.

For decades, big-acre crops like corn and wheat have been treated by tractors unleashing waterfalls of herbicide from long arms stretched above the crops, all to zap weeds that are often tiny and scattered about.