We've got a new member of the team here on the Shropshire Petals farm. They're solar powered, work up to 24 hours a day and remember exactly where millions of seeds are planted within a few millimetres. Introducing our Flower Robot!
World's first delphinium robot
This summer we're embracing the future of farming with a revolutionary robot that not only plants our beautiful flowers, but also weeds around them too! It's a world first for our delphiniums!
We plant a variety of different flowers on our family-run farm in lovely Shropshire every year. We usually plant our flowers via tractor or hand, and spend many hours weeding by hand. Once our flowers are perfectly bloomed, we pick them by hand, dry them onsite and send them worldwide as biodegradable petal confetti for eco-friendly weddings or dried flowers for gifts and arrangements.
We're putting our money where our mouth is and trying something that's never been done before and planting flowers with this state-of-the-art robot. No pressure!
Reducing CO2 emissions
Our robot is helping to reducing CO2 emissions as there's no need for a tractor so no need for fuel. Plus, with its lighter weight body is better for our soil, and reduces the risk of compaction. Our worms will love us!
Seed planting with high precision GPS
This clever robot uses high precision GPS to know the position of every single seed it plants, which helps it pull out pesky weeds, giving our flowers the best possible chance to grow tall and strong. We think it's bloom' marvellous!
If you're green fingered, then you'll know weeds can smother your best blooms if left to their own devises. As the robot will be weeding the flower field continually once everything is planted, the weeds should never get big enough to cause an issue for our beloved flowers, so they can concentrate all their energy on growing and blooming.
Solar Powered Flower Robot
The Flower Robot is powered by the sun! It has four large solar panels that generate enough power for 18-25 hours of continual planting and weeding. So, no need for plugging it in to charge or refuelling, it will simply harness what nature has to offer. We're keeping our fingers and toes crossed for plenty of sunshine.
Our robot has a top speed of 950 metres per hour, that's just over half a mile an hour. But what our little robot lacks in speed, it makes up for with accuracy.
Sustainability at Shropshire Petals
We're continually trying to improve our sustainability in terms of our practises and products. This includes our ongoing mission to replace horrible paper confetti with our sustainable biodegradable petal confetti for weddings across the world; our circular economy returns labels for you to send back any plastics for us to recycle; and our dispatch boxes made from 80% recycled sources and plant-based inks, to name just a few! Did we mention most of the farm is also run off solar power too?
We're dedicated to improve our footprint on the environment around us too, as we want to make it sustainable for future generations. We're already working toward a healthy agriculture system with regenerative farming practises too.
We know we still have a long way to go on our sustainability journey, but we're always making improvements to what we do and how we do it.
Our Flower Robot has a name!
Thank you to everyone on our social media accounts who submitted name suggestions for our wonderful Flower Robot, we had a great time going through them all. Thankfully one name was unanimous with the team, the winning name was... Florrie!
Follow to watch our progress
As with all first attempts, we honestly don't know if our Flower Robot will work, how well things will go, what lessons we will learn and what hurdles we will have to overcome. That said, we're willing to give it a try and do our part to push the future of farming to be as environmentally friendly as possible.
Make sure to follow the progress of our Flower Robot on our Instagram, Facebook and TikTok for regular behind the scenes updates.
Love as always,
SP xx
