WESTERN GROWERS CASE STUDY
Braga Fresh is a third-generation family farm that grows over 30,000 acres of organic and conventional specialty row crops throughout California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico.
Primarily growing organic baby leaf crops, they don’t have any options for crop protection products, so eliminating weeds prior to the LaserWeeder was completely done by hand. Braga Fresh accomplished this with three crews of 25 employees. It would take them an average 90 minutes per acre at an average cost of $900 per acre. “Hand weeding is a very tedious and hard job, and trying to find labor to help us get that done is getting harder every year,” says Kyle Harmon, Director of Farming. “Having large organic acres, we needed to find a solution to help us be more efficient.” Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeeder was the first viable solution Harmon saw on the market that could control weeds in high-density organic crops, so Braga Fresh decided to run some trials with it. The results left them impressed.
LASER WEEDING BY THE NUMBERS: COSTS AND SAVINGS
an average 18 hours a day, 6 days a week, Braga Fresh is able to cover an average 0.8 acres per hour. • Braga Fresh found the LaserWeeder to be very effective at killing weeds and volunteer crops like baby lettuces. Harmon says some of the crawling weeds, like goosefoot, can be tougher to control because it has multiple growing points. But of the typical weeds they encounter in the Salinas Valley — purslane, malva and lambsquarter — it successfully terminated. • Initially the LaserWeeder was accidentally shooting Braga Fresh’s arugula crop because of how different each arugula variety can look at different growth stages. But it only took a day and half for Carbon Robotics to identify the arugula varieties Braga Fresh was growing to update their model. Harmon says Carbon Robotics is
• Braga Fresh ran two LaserWeeders to cover 4,700 acres, or 2,350 acres per machine, of high-density organic crops: spinach, cilantro, arugula, swiss chard, baby kale, red and green spring mixes, and mizuna. All numbers presented below are based on one machine. • Braga Fresh purchased the LaserWeeder for $1.2 million, which on a 5-year depreciation schedule over 2,350 acres annually breaks down to a per-acre cost of $102.13. Braga Fresh uses two operators to run the machine, and with the additional expenses of hardware and Over-The-Air (OTA) service, tractor, fuel, and logistical operations, it costs a total $267.72 per acre to run the implement (see Table 1 for complete breakdown of costs). Running the machine
“ The amount of information is almost unlimited at this point. Now we’re just trying to figure out how to use it all. ” — Kyle Harmon, Braga Fresh, Director of Farming
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