Returning to his startup roots, former John Deere VP Jorge Heraud joins Rootwave to tackle weed management

Date:04-15-2024

By Jennifer Marston

″If I had to put a brand on me, it would be the ‘innovation guy,'″ says agtech veteran Jorge Heraud.

Heraud is probably best known as the founder of Blue River Technologies, which was acquired by John Deere in 2017 for $305 million. Post-acquisition, he spent seven years with Deere as its VP of automation and autonomy, a role he recently wound down. Now, he’s assumed a new position as a board member of UK startup Rootwave, which has developed an autonomous weeding system that uses electricity to zap unwanted plants in the field.

Jorge Heraud, former VP of Innovation at John Deere, now board member at Rootwave.

His enthusiasm for all things innovation has driven the whole of his career, which includes time in both the startup world (at Blue River Technologies, which he co-founded) and at big corporations, most notably Deere.

″I’m going to be joining startup boards and advising and that’s why I joined the Rootwave board,″ he tells AgFundernews. ″It’s a big new technology that can have this huge impact.″

″The whole industry is very aware of Jorge and who he is,″ adds Rootwave CEO Andrew Diprose. ″Blue River was about weed control. He knows his space, he knows machinery, so [Rootwave] resonated really well with Jorge and his values. To have him as a board member will offer a lot to our company in terms of all the experience and guidance he’ll be able to bring to the table.″

Herbicides: ‘We’re on a treadmill and this is not going to end pretty’

Heraud is no stranger to weeds, having joined Deere when the company acquired Blue River Technologies for its ″See & Spray″ system. That technology, which uses computer vision to diagnose and execute actions like spraying only weeds, is now a firmly entrenched offering in the John Deere toolkit. Heraud has said in the past that See & Spray can help farmers reduce their non-residual herbicide use by more than two thirds and maintain a hit rate comparable to traditional spraying.

Rootwave takes a different approach to tackling the ever-present weed problem; Diprose calls it using electricity to ″boil the weed inside out from the root up.″ The Rootwave system passes an electrical current through the weed, which turns that energy into heat, kickstarting the boiling process. Currently, the startup has a small machine that hitches to the back of a tractor and can treat orchards and vineyards; production and delivery of these machines has already begun.

″I had been looking for alternatives to herbicides for a while,″ says Heraud.

He adds that herbicide use amounts to $35 billion per year, a figure that equates to roughly 20 billion gallons of herbicides applied annually.

″That’s like a small lake of herbicides every year,″ he says. ″The problem is that it’s not working.″

Weed resistance to herbicides, for example, means that instead of using just one solution, farmers have to employ two or three each year, and sometimes four.

″It gets worse because once you get a weed that is resistant or at least partially resistant, all the seeds it produces are going to likely be also resistant or more tolerant of herbicides,″ he adds. This in turn will up the number of herbicides needed on the field during any given year.

″We’re on a treadmill and this is not going to end pretty.″

A view of RootWave’s weeding machine at work. Image credit: RootWave

A safer way to zap weeds

Biologicals can be a good alternative, he says, because they tend to fit directly into farmers’ existing workflows, but the space remains littered with efficacy issues and more than a few solutions that might be classified as ″bugs in a jug.″

Rootwave’s approach appealed to Heraud because of the way the company uses electricity.

″I was looking for alternative ways of killing weeds, given that chemistry is not going to work forever,″ he says. ″I had seen lasers and I had seen electricity and I wasn’t very keen because of two problems. One was that you need a lot of electricity [to kill weeds] and on top of that it wasn’t very safe.″

Traditional electro-weeding uses a direct current, which flows in one direction. Rootwave’s system is based on alternating current, which uses a higher voltage but transmits energy more efficiently, which Heraud says makes it safer to use.

He believes Rootwave’s approach is also superior to laser weeding because, unlike humans or animals that would bleed to death if hit by a laser, plants are ″almost immune.″

″It’s very hard because you have to hit [the plant] exactly at the growth point [with the laser] and need to dwell there. Plants have multiple growth points, so you’d have to kill them all. [Rootwave] goes through the plant and burns it, and it does it really, really fast.″

″There are several companies using high voltages to boil weeds, but we use high-frequency high voltages and they’re orders of magnitude more safe for the operator, the bystanders and the environment,″ says Diprose. ″I think [Jorge] really appreciated that and it really resonated with him as an engineer.″

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