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Flame-Throwing Tractors Kill Weeds [video]
- jessriedel 4y ago> The temperature can range between 500,000 to 1.2 million BTUs Oy...
- dgacmu 4y agoThank you. I was just yelling about that part. Science literacy is so lacking.
- zbrozek 4y agoYeah that made my stomach churn too.
- bombcar 4y agoEveryone knows BTUs stands for Big Temperature Units.
- labster 4y agoI bet it costs three cubic acres of money to buy.
- rad_gruchalski 4y agohttps://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/btu https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... > British thermal unit (the amount of heat needed to raise one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, equal to 1.055 x 103 joules)
- acquacow 4y agoI do this to my garden yearly before planting. Works very well.
- atourgates 4y agoI've had pretty disappointing results with flame-weeding. I live in a rural area in the Western US with some acreage, and try to avoid the use of herbicides as much as possible when I'm controlling weeds and invasives on our property. Flame weeding is far and away the most fun and satisfying way to deal with weeds, but it doesn't seem to do much for me beyond perhaps briefly annoying them. I've tried both near complete obliteration, and damaging the weed somewhat lightly under the theory that it'll expend its energy trying to "repair" itself, and die out more effectively in the long term. Neither seems to work well with the thistles and other plants I'm fighting. I've even seen some thistles come back particularly strong after a fire. My theory is that seeds from competing plants are burned, but thistles underground network of rhizomes are unaffected, and take advantage of the lack of competition. I recognize that fire is a natural and important part of the landscape and ecology of the West, but when it comes to crisping weeds, it seems to have limited use in my experience.
- tiedieconderoga 4y agoMost weeds regrow easily if you don't pull out their root structure.
- hosh 4y agoThere are adaptations against that, giving even greater tenacity and resilience. There are a whole bunch of plants that rhizomes. Attempting to pull out the root structure, in practice, helps propogate them via root division. Examples of such plants are running bamboo, kadzu, feverfew, bermuda grass, etc. For these kinds of plants, it’s better to change soil condition: use a technique called “sheet mulching”; it delays things enough to establish a different soil condition and different plants. Even then, it may not work.
- nl 4y agoWeeds have evolved to have their leaves eaten and otherwise destroyed. Many rely on animals eating them to spread their seed. You need some method to destroy the roots.
- hosh 4y agoFire is a great way to help restore soil. Some plants, as you found, come back stronger. The best way I have found to get rid of weeds without herbicide is to make sure something else is growing on there. Some weeds are pioneer plants. They come in on disturbed, and desolate soil. As they grow and thrive, they change the soil conditions so that other plants can grow there. These plants are tenacious, but ironically, changes things so that they are out-competed by other plants. If you fight them, they dig in and get stronger. If you help them fulfill their ecological function, then they help make way for something else.
- jaggederest 4y agoI keep trying to explain this to my father, who insists that mowing his entire noxious-weed-covered property is the only way to deal with them. Unfortunately, that's the only sure-fire way to keep them sticking around - scalp the soil bare 5x a year.
- SirLJ 4y agoThere are also small shaped like walk-in sticks working with small propane bottles and they are perfect for driveways, walkways stone patios, etc…
- paulkrush 4y agoI have seen better versions. The incoming air should be preheated with the exhaust. The exhaust should be barely warm. The weed can be part of the fuel. OH, and of course in the future it will be solar powered and run on the blockchain!
- paulkrush 4y agoBetter: https://www.physicalweeding.com/flameweeding/index.html https://www.physicalweeding.com/flameweeding/index.html Microwave: https://www.futurity.org/microwaves-weeds-2177112-2/ https://www.futurity.org/microwaves-weeds-2177112-2/
- paulkrush 4y agoI forgot about chicken trackers: https://www.google.com/search?q=chicken+tractor https://www.google.com/search?q=chicken+tractor
- gnicholas 4y agoInteresting to hear that this is used for organic crops, in lieu of chemical pesticides. I wonder if people who eat organic food would be less likely to do so if they knew that fields were being flame-throwed multiple times a season in order to avoid using pesticides. It's a complex question, since it involves personal safety, environmental harm, and fossil fuel combustion.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bluGill 4y agoThere is a lot of organic farming that is worse for the environment than standard herbicides. But you can't tell people that without massive downvotes and screams of 'but the chemicals'
- jaggederest 4y agoVery frustrating to see swiss water process decaf advertised as chemical free. Water, my friends, is a chemical. (As are coffee beans)
- dehrmann 4y agoIt isn't just a chemical, it's the "universal solvent." The other funny thing on organic farming and chemicals is nicotinoids can be used. They break down, but before that happens, they're not great.
- whyenot 4y agoThat is not true, at least in the United States. Tobacco dust (Nicotine sulfate) may not be used on organic crops. see https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/subchapter-M/part-205/subpart-G/subject-group-ECFR0ebc5d139b750cd https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
- throwbadubadu 4y ago
- nl 4y agoI've experimented with this and other methods for home use. One thing I've found very effective is steam and boiling water - especially for pavers. It does more than just killing the leaves - the boiling water penetrates and kills roots.
- cduzz 4y agoWhat's the process for steaming a patch of soil? It seems like running a mobile autoclave would be really good at killing everything in the soil, which is probably both good (gets rid of the weeds) and bad (kills everything). Are there mobile soil steaming systems? Certainly that'd be way less toxic than dumping a bunch of chemicals all over.
- nl 4y agoI used a Kurtcher (I think?) steam cleaner that is used to power a steam mop, but just had the spray thing that I think it for cleaning windows. I'm not aware of any special devices, but I did think that for paving specifically there would be a market. We had a kid who was crawling and didn't want to use toxic poisons on the paving, so I had to think about alternatives.
- prmoustache 4y agoYou sureley meant the german brand Kärcher, that you can spell Kaercher if you don't have easy access to the umlaut. https://www.kaercher.com/us/home-garden/steam-cleaners.html https://www.kaercher.com/us/home-garden/steam-cleaners.html
- eliaspro 4y agoBut I could imagine, it doesn't only kill the roots, but all microorganisms around them as well so you'll end up with dead dirt instead of a proper soil. I also wonder about the energy footprint for heating that much water... My intuition screams "far too much to be a reasonable scalable alternative".
- 4y ago
- pkaye 4y agoThis company is using lasers and image recognition to kill weeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP0yiOI8Qas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP0yiOI8Qas