One man's junk may well be many others' good fortune with the latest innovation of Hawke's Bay agricultural contractor Andy Lysaght, who last month won two major national awards with an 18-month-old invention known as the Andweeder.
Designed to eliminate hand-weeding of crops, it started a year-and-a-half ago as a raw prototype scrapped together from unwanted bits of metal in his Omarunui shed to win the Ravensdown Innovation Award at the National Horticultural Field Day in Hastings and then the Launch New Zealand Innovation Award at the National Fieldays at Mystery Creek, south of Hamilton.
Now a marketable item and in the process of being patented in 148 countries, its target is the weeds among squash, where fine-tuning and field trials have seen error rates cut to near perfect.
Ongoing development is expected to adapt the Andweeder to other crops, with some degree of astonishment from Fieldays judges who commented: "This product brings a step change to the industry, converting an intensive manual process to an automated and precision process. In doing so, they've solved a long-standing problem that has bamboozled hi-tech machine vision technology."
In short, where infra-red sensors have to date failed, touch-triggered mechanics is succeeding, as highlighted in one trial when 20 hectares was split in half and it was machine against man. A three-row Andweeder did in 6hrs 45mins what otherwise needed 125 man-hours when done by hand.