Throughout the year, the Tensorfield team has been working hard deploying Jetty – our superheated vegetable oil weeding robot – in trials across several growing regions on the West Coast with one of the country’s largest growers of fresh produce.
The main objective of these trials is (i) to quantify the performance of the technology on three critical metrics across a range of real-world field conditions:
- Weed kill efficacy – as measured by residual hand labor required to hand-weed the trial area vs. the control plot
- Collateral crop loss – as measured with stand counts in flagged areas within the trial area
- Overall system productivity – as well as economic impact per acre with our pricing model
And (ii) to feed back lessons learned from the field deployments to improve system performance through both software and hardware upgrades.
There have been many lessons learned during field testing and co-development with our grower partners, and we’ve continued to roll out feature improvements throughout the year. At a high level, some of the key lessons that we’re able to share have been:
Low ambient temperatures mean a greater thermal dose per weed to ensure weed lethality
After some very encouraging field tests in the Fall of 2024, we saw weed lethality drop off when testing in cold January conditions. We realized this was due to a combination of factors – including overall heat loss to the environment as well as the weed tissues requiring a greater energy input to reach the temperatures required for protein destruction and cell death.
A series of hardware upgrades and some refinements to the micro-jet nozzle design now allow us to deliver bigger doses of superheated vegetable oil to the same sub-centimeter targets while maintaining a constant travel speed of 1.2 mph. We recorded Jetty at 1.2 mph in a very high-weed-density environment shown below. Due to Tensorfield’s fixed-array nozzle design (think giant inkjet printer on wheels) – we don’t need to slow down when the number of targets increases: no aiming = no dwell time.
Per-weed pricing works! But it needs dialing in
Our business model of weeding as a service – charging a fixed price-per-acre plus a variable cost-per-weed-shot was new and untested. Developing a financially sustainable model which guarantees the grower significant ROI for every acre of crop that we’re deployed on has been a collaborative process, requiring a high degree of transparency and flexibility throughout. We’re grateful for the opportunity for us to learn exactly how a large grower assesses the economic impact of any technology they are trialing, and for working with us openly to ensure we continue to build solutions that will provide them ROI in any environment.
Thermal micro-jetting works! But it needs dialing in
As with any technology – there are some caveats and adjustments to be made to compensate for crop spacing, wind drift, weed size and weed density, but we’ve shown beyond any doubt that thermal micro-jetting is an effective approach for high-density organic weed control that has order-of-magnitude speed and cost advantages over existing approaches. Our models are constantly learning – and improving. We’re continuously rolling out features like dynamic crop buffer protection zones and target size thresholds to allow the grower to balance maximal weed kill with overspray risk, and we provide field insights with data such as stand counts, crop size and crop position metrics for every acre we run on.
In summary – the trials are ongoing, the initial results are promising – and we’re constantly improving Jetty week by week in a dynamic co-development process with our grower partner. Contact us if you’re interested in a trial for your farm!
info@tensorfield.ag