Sustainable management of waste in green nursery: the Tuscan experience

The green nursery sector in Europe involves 90,000 ha of cultivated land and 120,000 ha for the nurseries (MiPAAF, 2012), reaching 19.8 billions of Euros in 2011. Every year, nurseries produce waste about 4 kg of the residual biomass for each m2 of the potted plants cultivation. Nurseries waste make up a substantial quantity of organic materials e.g. wood biomass-substrate, which could be retrieved and valorized. With the expansion of potted plants cultivation and the resulting increase in discarded products a number of companies have begun to setting up solutions for the recovery of materials accumulated. Analysis led to the development of a separating system based on trunk vibration technology. To this end, two shaker yard were identified, developed and tested for the recovery of residual biomasses. With these solutions, green waste can be easily grasped by a clamp device able to convey strong vibrations to the trunk (or to the aerial part of the plant) to the point that the soil materials are detached from the vegetable portions

An autonomous ground mobile unit for the precision physical weed control.

In this paper the design, the main characteristics and the automation systems of innovative autonomous ground mobile units (GMU) for physical weed control (PWC) in maize are described. The machine will be created within the activities of the European Project RHEA (Robot fleets for Highly Effective Agriculture and forestry management), that aims to produce different prototypes of autonomous terrestrial and aerial robot able to perform several activities related to the general crop protection in different agricultural scenarios. The first autonomous ground unit machine was designed in order to perform a mechanical and thermal treatment removing weeds from the inter-row crop space and applying in-row selective and precision flaming by means of two crossed LPG rod burners. By means of some modifications of the tools it will be possible to realize also an autonomous unit for the precision broadcast flaming application. In this case the design involves a replacement of the mechanical tools working in the inter-row space with 50 cm wide burners able to perform flaming at different intensities according to weed cover detected by the perception system of the robot. The working width of both the PWC machines will be of 4.5 m, thus covering five entire maize inter-row spaces of 0.75 m each and 2 half inter-row space of 0.375 m each. The correct position of the tools (mechanical and thermal) will be guaranteed by an automatic precision guidance system connected and supervised to an image based row detection system. Each working elements will be provided by two crossed 0.25 m wide rod burners, hitting one side of each crop row. The flame should hit the weeds growing in the “inrow” space (a 0.25 m wide strip of soil with the maize plant in the middle). Regarding the control of the weed emerged in the “inter-row” space each working unit of the will be provided with rigid tools (one central foot-goose and two side “L” shaped sweeps). The mechanical treatment will be performed, independently from the weed presence, as hoeing is a very important agronomical practice. On the contrary, broadcast flaming in the inter-row space will be performed after weed detection, using three different LPG pressures and doses according to weed cover (no weed cover-no treatment, weed cover between 0 and 25%-flaming at 0.3 MPa, weed cover higher than 25%-flaming at 0.4 MPa). This very innovative application of precision PWC in maize could represent not only a good opportunity for farmers in term of herbicide use reduction, but also an environmental friendly and energy saving application of flaming in organic farming