Induced plant necrosis, such as crop thinning, is a common practice in agriculture, in which plants are selectively removed from densely seeded plant beds to provide the remaining plants with adequate space for growth. Conventional crop thinning is performed manually, wherein a worker walks along a crop row and removes plants within the crop row with a hoe at his discretion. Not only are these methods costly and time consuming due to the use of human labor, but these methods also fail to offer a maximization of plant yield over the entire field, as the worker typically focuses on a single row and does not select plants for retention based on inter-row packing. While automatic crop thinning systems exist, these systems fail to offer the plant removal flexibility in plant selection and removal that human labor offers. In one example, a conventional crop thinning system removes plants at fixed intervals, whether or not the plant removal was necessary. In another example, a conventional crop thinning system removes plants using system vision, but fails to identify multiple close-packed plants as individual plants and treats the close-packed plants as a single plant.
Therefore, there is a need in the agriculture implement field for a new and useful method and apparatus for automated inducement of plant necrosis.
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