Hi everybody this is Joe Lample the Joe behind Joe Gardner and welcome to the

Joe Gardner show today's podcast is a brand new episode contrary to my

mentioning last week that this one was going to be an encore episode. It's not. Today we're

talking about weeds and I have a podcast listener to thank for introducing my

guest today. Tim Pate sent me a DM on Instagram a few months back and suggested I reach out to Dr. Nathan

Boyd with the University of Florida. Tim and Dr. Boyd had become friends and said that he has an interesting story.

Because Tim was a long-time listener, I knew that he knew the kind of people I like to connect

with and thought Dr Boyd had an interesting story related to his work with farmers and growers around

weed management.

Well, Tim, you're right.

First, thanks for the referral and yes, Dr Boyd does have an interesting story that has application

to Home Gardeners' Weed challenges too.

But what I really liked about this episode was that in our 30-something minute conversation,

it evolved into areas of his work that were really on the edge, using AI and ground-based drones

to help identify weeds in the field, their emergent states, density, and growth rate,

etc, as a way of managing weeds on a more granular level to

ultimately minimize or eliminate the use of herbicides and that was just part of

our sidebar conversation around weed management.

Who knew we would go there, but I'm glad we did.

And while some of what we talked about today is based more on weed management on a larger

scale than what home gardeners can benefit from for now.

This is a rapidly evolving science involving the intersection of technology and biology with a goal of fewer weeds and less chemical applications.

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