Autonomous farm robots guided by GPS can plant and harvest multiple crops in close proximity, enabling beneficial interactions between different plants and potentially boosting biodiversity.
Strip cropping, which involves partitioning fields into narrow bands containing different plants, is a common farming practice. Now, robotic technology is making it possible to space crops closer together than ever before.
Kit Franklin at Harper Adams University, UK, who is working on trials of this method, says one can think of it as taking the diverse planting approach that an allotment gardener might and scaling it up massively with autonomous machinery. This could enable commercial farms to stop planting vast, non-biodiverse fields and reap the benefits of mingling plants with different needs and mutually beneficial habits, he says.
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