DESKTOP DESTROYER REVOLUTION SOFTWARE

The pattern recognition of the video-computer system is not so accurate. One stroke of the hoe and the weed is gone.'

'Processing color, texture, location, shape. 'With a human, he knows immediately this is a weed, this is a tomato.' A field hand from a small village in Mexico constitutes the best microprocessor on the market. 'This is the tricky part,' Slaughter says.ДЄt present, the typical large-scale tomato farmer must hire a crew of 40 men and women - mostly migrant workers from Mexico, and we will get into the social implications of this stuff later - to stalk the blazing hot fields with hoes to dispatch the weeds in the rows.

DESKTOP DESTROYER REVOLUTION SOFTWARE

The images flash to the computer, which has been loaded with pattern recognition software and is frantically trying to figure out what is the Red Gold of the Sacramento Valley and what is not. Now the cool part: The second camera is not staring ahead, but is looking down below at the row of tomatoes and the weeds growing among them out of reach of the disks and blades. Mounted aboard the wagon are two rather ordinary videocameras, the kind they use at the mall for shoplifter surveillance and to provide changing-room soft porn for security guards.

Think of a wagon, the size of a kid's go-cart, that will be pulled behind a tractor - at least for now (later it might cruise along, steered by satellites or laser guidance systems). Slaughter and his busy graduate student, Won Suk Lee, are down in the laboratory in the bowels of Bainer Hall, working on their latest version of the Digital Weed Destroyer. Stuff that grows on vines, trees, in rows. Kiwi, oranges, almonds, grapes, peaches, tomatoes. But more deliciously difficult, they've got all the nuts, fruits, and vegetables appropriate to the California setting. The curious pilgrim seeking one institution through which to view the future of farming in all its cornucopian splendor could do no better than visit the University of California at Davis, the sun-baked sprawling state school where digital farming got its start in the clunky 1960s.ДЇor not only are the researchers at Davis some of the biggest brand names in the business, but their 'problems' are so damn interesting. But life is too short to focus on grain alone. Indeed, the last gathering of farming's digital tribe drew 600 participants at the University of Minnesota, where they do damn good work. The inventors who are bringing these emerging technologies to the farm number in the thousands at dozens of the world's premier agriculture schools and research shops.

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