Remote‐Sensing for Herbicide‐Free Agriculture: A Bio‐Economic and Policy Appraisal

Pesticide reduction is increasingly incentivised in European agriculture but may generate trade‐offs. For example, replacing herbicides with mechanical weed control methods is associated with higher costs and exacerbated soil compaction and erosion. We develop a bio‐economic modelling approach to explore the potential of remote sensing technologies to measure weed pressure levels to reduce mechanical weed control interventions in herbicide‐free production systems. The model is applied to Swiss winter wheat production and accounts for different remote sensing technologies, production systems, and cost scenarios for mechanical control. The model is further used to conduct ex‐ante policy analysis, that is, to assess how fuel taxation affects the viability of different technologies. Our results show that remote‐sensing technologies have the potential to reduce the number of mechanical control interventions, but that these benefits vary across production systems and cost structures. We further find that fuel taxation has a limited additional impact on technology benefits.