Taking Weeds Out Without Taking the Crop

Weeds are removed by hand across the project’s blocks. It is repetitive, it is physically hard, it happens continuously through the growing season, and the labour needed grows in direct proportion to the area farmed.

This task alone consumes a large share of the 50 ground workers’ time. Every hour spent deweeding is an hour not spent on work that expands the project. It is the clearest example of a task that blocks growth.

Weeding machinery exists for large monoculture farms with wide, regular rows and tractors to pull it. Project Chitoor has blocks and clusters, not prairie. Herbicides are the other standard answer and are unattractive for a project built around sustainability. And the core difficulty is real: a machine has to remove a plant growing next to another plant without damaging the roots of the one you want.

• Branch — Mechanical. The purest mechanical engineering problem in this pool.
• Technical skills — Mechanism and linkage design, soil and tool interaction, fabrication, ergonomics, materials and wear, cost engineering, field testing.
• Other skills — Measuring a baseline before you change anything, iterating from failure, designing for the person who has to use it all day.