Major Agriculture Reforms likely in North Korea

A source close to both Pyongyang and Beijing told Reuters' Benjamin Kang Lim that farmers will soon be allowed to keep half their crop:

"Peasants will have incentive to grow more food. They can keep and sell in the market about 30-50 percent of their harvest depending on the region,"

The move appears to be an attempt to lightly reform the North Korean economy so that the famines of the 1990s would not be repeated. 

The incentive would mark a reversal of a clampdown on private enterprise that began in 2005, and appears to be directed at rising rice prices widely reported by overseas press.

Read more: Business Insider

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Tech News: Robot to replace herbicides for weed-killing

Technology has helped humanity in many areas, besides destroying and killing people with bombs and lasers.

Now to kill weeds, research is underway to do it with robots, rather than herbicides.

As reported, Scientists at Blue River Technology will commercialize a weed-killing robot after landing $3.1 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures. The agricultural invention uses algorithms to differentiate between good and bad plants, injecting the bad with enough fertilizer to kill it.

The wheeled bot is still in the prototype stage at this point. But Blue River sees its machine as a cost-effective and safer solution to potentially reduce U.S. herbicide use by more than 250 million pounds per year.

Read more: Mashable

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