When hiring a hoeing crew, farmer Thomas Barnett often feels like he’s setting himself up for disappointment.

Workers are seldom enthusiastic about hoeing, even if they’re getting paid around $20 an hour, he said.

Ordering a crew of 20 from a labor contractor may only result in 10 workers showing up, with about half as many returning the next day, Barnett said.

“You’re out in the elements. You’re hot. It’s not difficult work, but it’s physical,” he said.

However, with the Robovator — a machine that detects weeds with a camera and removes them from between rows — Barnett can get by with a smaller crew for getting rid of the stragglers.

“Those five guys can get the job done,” he said.

Barnett is one of seven growers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley who’ve spent the past month trying out the robotic cultivator, primarily in squash crops. The farmers are sharing the $11,000 cost of renting the machine with the Oregon Processed Vegetable Commission.

From the results he’s seen, Barnett said he’s “tickled to death” with the machine’s performance and now must decide whether to continue renting or to buy one.

“This is going to make it so the hoeing is a lot less painful,” he said.

The Robovator caught the eye of Ed Peachey, an Oregon State University horticulture professor, while exploring innovations in California vegetable production.

The robotic cultivators are mostly used in lettuce there, so Willamette Valley farmers wanted to see if the machines could be adapted to local crops, he said.

“We’re just putting our foot in the door to see what the technology can do and where we go from here,” Peachey said.

Due to advancements in computer processing speed and image recognition, the machine’s cameras are now able to examine rows of plants and identify weeds while traveling about 1.5 mph, he said.

California’s vegetable industry can offer Oregon growers a peek into the future, but because operations there are on a much larger scale, the economics are also different, Peachey said. “These machines are expensive and it takes a lot of capital to get them in the field.”

Growers who spread the cost of the $150,000 machine over tens of thousands of acres can more easily justify the investment than those on smaller acreage, said Barnett, who farms about 550 acres in the northern Willamette Valley.

Even so, Barnett said the Robovator makes financial sense for his operation, since he estimates the machine would cut his hoeing costs by half.

“The return on investment would be just a matter of years, it’s just that initial capital,” he said.

Renting the machine each year would solve that problem, but owning would be convenient because he wouldn’t have to wait use it whenever it was needed, Barnett said.

Once the machine identifies a weed, two knives close together on the row to kill it and then open again to make way for the crop, he said.

It’s likely that weeding would be most effective during the initial cotyledon phase of crop development, when the size difference between the weeds and crops allows the machine to be most accurate, Barnett said.

The parameters can be set to be more or less aggressive in eliminating weeds, which in turn affects the number of crop casualties, he said.

“What’s your tolerance?” he said. “It’s that balancing act, of which I prefer.”

While Oregon farmers drew inspiration from California in experimenting with the Robovator, its introduction to California was influenced by developments in Europe.

Pacific Ag Rentals, which rented the machine to Oregon farmers, bought one of the robotic cultivators after a demonstration in Germany about five years ago, said John Kaupp, manager of its Salinas, Calif., branch.

The company has since grown its rental fleet to 15 Robovators, which serve the West Coast, in addition to selling some of the machines, he said. “There are a lot of products in Europe making their way over here, or products in Europe that they’re now making in the U.S.”