A robot that removes weeds, and a new fertilizer that can help farmers reduce up to one-quarter of their fertilizer use were on Tuesday last week unveiled by the Council of Agriculture’s Tea Research and Extension Station.
Tea and coffee are listed as important cash crops in Taiwan, and the inventions would cut labor costs and promote ecological balance, the station told a news conference in Taipei.
Station director Su Tsung-chen (蘇宗振) said that weeding accounts for 30 percent of the total cost of managing a tea farm, and that most farms usually have to hire workers to complete the job.
Photo: CNA
It costs about NT$26,000 per hectare annually to weed farms, but that goes go up to about NT$100,000 if it is an organic farm that does not use herbicides, Su said.
The station’s robot uses real-time kinematic positioning technology, which significantly increases the precision of the robot as it moves, minimizing the margin of error to within 10cm, Su said.
The robot moves at a speed of 1kph to 1.5kph, taking four to six hours to finish weeding a hectare of tea, he added.
The robot is also equipped with a small rod which, if it bumps into a tea tree, prompts the robot to lift the weeding machine to prevent damaging the tree roots, Su said.
The research overhead and development for the robot cost about NT$500,000, but with mass manufacturing, the cost could be lowered, Su added.
As the size of coffee plantations in Taiwan have almost doubled from 560 hectares in 2007 to 1,167 hectares last year, the station has worked with Fwusow Industry and the Yunlin County Coffee Production and Sales Center to develop a new type of fertilizer that can be used when plants are budding, flowering and during the two stages of fruition, Su said.
Fwusow would be selling the new fertilizer, he added.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
ANNUAL EVENT: Two massive Pokemon balloons are to be set up in Daan Park, with an event zone operating from 10am to 6pm This year’s Taipei Floral Picnic is to be held at Daan Park today and tomorrow, featuring an exclusive Pokemon Go event, a themed food market, a coffee rave picnic area and stage performances, the Taipei Department of Information and Tourism said yesterday. Two massive Pokemon balloons are to be set up in the park as attractions, with an exclusive event zone operating from 10am to 6pm, it said. Participants who complete designated tasks on-site would have a chance to receive limited-edition souvenirs, it added. People could also try the newly launched game Pokemon Pokopia in the trial area, the department said. Three PokeStops are
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
RSS