Improve Weed Management - Stop the weeds when seeds

In grain production throughout the U.S. and the world farmers rely on herbicides tillage andorganic weed control to keep weed pressures low to not reduce yields or crop value. Howevermany weeds have grown resistant to these countermeasures and grain production is plagued byescape weeds caused by uncontrollable weather or weed management issues. Combines used forharvesting cash crops also incidentally harvest weeds whose seeds are separated from the rest ofthe plant and the grain discarded back into the field with the chaff and remain viable to grow intonuisance weeds. During a prior SBIR Global Neighbor developed directed energy (DE) technologyfor weed abatement and commercialized handheld weed control product NatureZap DE availablethrough Amazon and others. Continuing this work under a funded Phase-2 USAF-SBIR (ContractFA9302-19-C-0008) GNI has demonstrated the validity of this technology to render weed seedsunviable and is proposing to engineer a DE product that when installed on a combine will makethe incidentally harvested weed seeds unviable thus reducing the carryover effect of escape weeds.GNI conducted initial testing on chaff supplied from the extended team and interviewed 22 farmers.This along with the previous work convinced us the combine project will succeed. With it farmerswill have reasonably priced tool to aid in controlling escape and herbicide resistant weeds. Thisreduces the requirement for increasingly potent herbicides that have unintended consequences.Sensational headlines like: Jury orders Monsanto to pay $289 million to cancer patient in Rounduplawsuit are just starting.