These could range from high tech methods like using AI and lasers to more traditional ways of working with nature.

Like controlled burns and mass weed-ins?
posted by y2karl at 8:28 PM on November 15 [1 favorite]

When it comes to modern heavy-duty chemical approaches and so-called "AI" vs. techniques that have been honed over thousands or tens of thousands of years, I know where my money would go. ...It's just a shame I don't have any money
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:13 PM on November 15 [3 favorites]

Don't lump image classification with LLM garbage. Using a camera to recognize weeds is totally do-able.
posted by ryanrs at 9:22 PM on November 15 [7 favorites]

And yes, this will select for weeds with leaves that look really similar to soybean leaves!

Then Monsanto et al can get to work genetically modifying soybeans to have purple leaves with scalloped margins or some shit.
posted by ryanrs at 9:28 PM on November 15 [2 favorites]

Where do I get in line for a laser??!?

I'm lookin' at you, puncture vine and morning glory!
posted by BlueHorse at 9:41 PM on November 15

If there existed an outdoor Roomba that I could deploy to laser cook soliva sessilis I'd buy one yesterday.
posted by flabdablet at 11:00 PM on November 15

Is there a Canada thistle laser? We got a little bit this year, which is to say we're going to have a lot next year.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 11:30 PM on November 15

I'm lookin' at you, puncture vine and morning glory!

Puncture vine I have never seen but what you call morning glory I call bindweed. It is king of the monster weeds. It can be barely controlled but it cannot ever be eradicated or extirpated. Its roots run deep and it can regenerate from a cut stem left on the ground. This is its tender annual cousin (Ipomea tricolor) Heavenly Blue morning glory. It is fragile and tender and its flowers begin to wilt by noon. Heavenly Blue and certain other Ipomeas have certain properties due to their high levels of ergot not to mention LSA as in lysergic acid amide. See Erowid for details.

But preparation is arduous, consumption can lead to nausea and hurling or so I, ahem, have been told. And nausea and hurling are two experiences not enhanced by being in a psychedelic state of mind. But man, they are beautiful flowers. The blue tapers to a translucent white throat in which the pollen on the stamens glow gold. I mean those flowers were telling the Huichol Indians something from times immemorial, I think. They consumed ipomea when peyote was out of season.
posted by y2karl at 11:35 PM on November 15 [3 favorites]

It’s the agricultural equivalent of antibiotic resistance, and it keeps getting worse.

Good analogy, and the routine prophylactic overuse of it is what causes the resistance. It'd be like if we all just took a good handful of wide-spectrum antibiotics on the daily, you know to prevent disease. Their use should not be this routine, even before we consider their effects on the wider environment, including directly on us humans.

I've worked in contexts where chemical weed intervention was not legal (graveyards, and fields within a certain distance of graveyards, both in Denmark) and while mechanical approaches to dealing with weeds are more labour-intensive, they can absolutely be effective.
posted by Dysk at 12:14 AM on November 16 [6 favorites]

Dysk, the UK must be a lot more progressive to disallow herbicides in graveyards - here in NZ herbicide is used everywhere, just everywhere, also a chemical called Tordon (active ingredient picloram) - a long term residual, that farmers and councils are very casual about, and that adds serious complications to some of my jobs.

I studied herbicides at uni, and at one point sought to get a degree in that. What concerns me is that all weed control knowledge has shrunk down to glyphosate when there are 22 herbicide families (22 different chemical pathways). I see contractors using glyphosate in situations where they have no effect, or where a different herbicide would preseve some useful plant cover.

When I studied we were taught glyphosate resistance was very unlikely, but now it is resistant to gly., and several others. Evolution always wins.

In my own work I increasingly employ allelopathy where clients don't want scorched Earth. But allelopathy is really only workable on a per site basis, unless a design (or situation) is very simple. But for cemeteries there are some fescue grasses that, once established, won't allow anything else to grow.
posted by unearthed at 12:43 AM on November 16 [3 favorites]

the UK must be a lot more progressive to disallow herbicides in graveyards

???

I specifically mentioned in my comment that this was in Denmark, and made no mention of the UK...
posted by Dysk at 12:51 AM on November 16 [1 favorite]

there are some fescue grasses that, once established, won't allow anything else to grow

How do those do when grazed off by hard hoofed horses?

Looking for basically anything that will outcompete soliva sessilis on ground subjected to repeated compaction.
posted by flabdablet at 12:59 AM on November 16

Sorry Dysk despite your words I mixed countries up.

Flabdablet, I'll have a look tomorrow, see what I've got, do you want something that is a barefoot comfortable alt. to the Soliva? (which I know of as Onehunga-weed). How dry is your climate?
posted by unearthed at 1:24 AM on November 16 [2 favorites]

Anything I can walk on barefoot without having to hoik endless little spikes out afterwards would be great, if it out-competes bindiis. Would make the dog happy too.

We have a few patches of clover that give it a fair old go, but it loses badly anywhere the hoofers have regular access to because compaction. Topsoil is sand/silt, subsoil is silt/clay/pebble+cobble.

https://www.eldersweather.com.au/climate-history/vic/bruthen
posted by flabdablet at 2:04 AM on November 16 [1 favorite]

We'd be OK to do a bit of roto-till and early watering to get whatever it is established, but the hoofs are always going to win in the end.
posted by flabdablet at 2:09 AM on November 16

Just thinking a bit more about where the clover is winning, most of it is in patches fairly close to the house that regularly get pissed on. How do you rate my chances of just burning the shit out of the Soliva with something intensely nitrogenous, urea maybe, with woodchip over it to make walking paths?
posted by flabdablet at 2:18 AM on November 16

Flabdablet, as a general rule healthy bio-diverse ecosystems are needed to defeat mono-cultures run amok. I would find an area near you that seems to be thriving and observe what kind of plant/animal communities are there.

You might not want to replace one invasive plant with another one, but instead try and recreate a healthy mix of things that mirror the natives in your local ecosystem.

As I am totally unfamiliar with your area I couldn't offer you advise on what plants and animals that would be, but i am sure someone around you is growing native plants and would be happy to talk your ear off about them.
posted by stilgar at 4:24 AM on November 16

Healthy biodiverse ecosystems are quite hard to achieve on the parts of this soil that the horses routinely compact.

None of the local native ground covers are adapted to the conditions that hard-footed animals create in the local soils, unfortunately, Australia being a land of soft-footed marsupials. The presence of the hard-footed animals is non-negotiable, so the options are basically weeds or dust. Obviously I prefer weeds :-)

The invasive I'd like to suppress is by no means the only ground cover that does grow on this soil, but it's a specialist for compacted ground and arid conditions so it does at least as well as the other ground covers that it grows amongst and it doesn't take much dry weather for it to do much better. I wouldn't mind, but it has these complete bastard sharper-than-hypodermic spikes on its seeds.
posted by flabdablet at 4:38 AM on November 16

I'm imagining the exact same article in forty years when all of the laser-targeted weeds have evolved to be visually indistinguishable from corn.
posted by Vulgar Euphemism at 7:18 AM on November 16 [1 favorite]

It is kind of wild to me that we have carbon capture problems but also plants that grow too fast. I know it’s more complicated than that but I have to wonder if it needs to be.
posted by mhoye at 8:08 AM on November 16

Weeds evolving to look like (and have similarly large seed heads) to grain crops is how we got some of our crops. Barley is believed to have been a weed in wheat fields that was unintentionally selected into a viable crop by the weeding and winnowing of farmers. So maybe the murder-laser-bots can provide selective breeding services!
posted by agentofselection at 8:17 AM on November 16 [3 favorites]

I'm not that optimistic about the high tech solutions. It'll take long enough for them to be viable on a large scale commercial level.

I bet that before that happens the norm will be to spray the hell out of your field and then hire undocumented folks work the field to manually remove the remaining weeds in the same horrid conditions they work now for crops that can't be harvested by machine. Except now the field is full of chemicals and they'd be working at it every day, not just during the harvest. So it'll 'cause a bunch of nasty health issues that will just be ignored.

I suppose there's some hope that with wildly increased demand for field labor that pay will have to increase and conditions improved.

I could also totally see the job of "herbicide consultant" becoming a thing the way that soil scientists are already a thing. Heck, after typing that out the two would come as a set. Then they'd be able to tell farmers what to spray where and for what reason. Get back to targeted applications of specific chemicals and techniques from the wide variety available instead of spraying whole fields with the same stuff. With the selection pressure removed plants should start to lose their resistance right?
posted by VTX at 8:32 AM on November 16

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