If they were able to make drones work, it could open up more variable farm designs: rows are mostly necessary so that farms can be serviced by vehicles.

Polyculture farming could become much more economically feasible if drones could weed out all non-whitelisted species.

Would also be a great boon to forestry: would be awesome to make a bunch of drones to fly through forests and zap any non-native invasive species it sees.

>If they were able to make drones work, it could open up more variable farm designs: rows are mostly necessary so that farms can be serviced by vehicles.

Sure, but the weedkiller isn't the only vehicle that needs to work on the farm. I don't think flying drones are going to be ploughing any time soon.

> If they were able to make drones work

Yes, let's put powerful lasers on drones flown by AI. What could happen? I just hope the human recognition model doesn't shoot more of one race than another.

> zap any non-native invasive species it sees

Given the climate change it could be the other way around. Zap some native saplings, which can no longer thrive.

I'll bet there's creative solutions that could take advantage of a hub and spoke model. Picture a solar recharging base station that drones can dock with to charge while others rotate in.

Drones don't need to be battery operated - but, I agree that there is no reason to use them in fields which are already designed for vehicle access with semi-standardized dimensions.

If they're fuel powered drones, they need to refuel. Plus that's potentially expensive to operate depending how many you need and how heavy they are.

There's probably something to be said for hard-wired drones here. The weight of the cable is something you have to contend with, but with a physical wire you can run a larger drone longer.

How is that better than a wheeled drone dragging a giant orange extension cord behind it?

I'm not sure that's a great idea either, but flying brings more problems than it solves in this problem space.

Given that the plants are on the ground, I imagine not sweeping over them with an extension cable would be an obvious advantage. Still, you could work with suspended powerlines as easily for the big-box drone as with tractors, which brings me to another (probably dumb) question: Why has nobody built a landline electric tractor?

Farmers sweep things along the field all the time. The standard farming sprinkler is supplied by pipes / hoses which are bridged above crop height between wheeled towers. As the spinkler works its way in a circle on the field around the water supply, the towers roll over a negligible amount of crop.

> landline electric tractor

Well, there are some robots that travel on aerial lines, typically used for cable inspection. Here's a quick search result: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...

For vehicles, crops yes, animal husbandry often roads get you to parts of a property but are far from covering a property.

Hydrogen. Even lighter, much cheaper, and would save on a (very!) finite natural resource.

And, hey, with unmanned drones over rural fields you won't get any Hindenburg disasters.