Saturday, July 4, 2009

The Gardeners' Gopher Problem


My gardener friends complain endlessly about gophers eating and damaging their plants. They also recount their histories of tactics to defeat the furry little geniuses, all failures.

My thought: Build a small robot to wander the gopher tunnels, detecting and eliminating the furry little geniuses. Perhaps deploy a number of such robots per plot, each at different tunnel location, to cover all escape routes.

Seems to me if one can build a robot to vacuum one's carpets, one should have little trouble building one to solve the gopher problem.

Research and imagination needed for design specifications.

1 comment:

Thomas Wittman said...

Hi Anthony, Actually they do use a vacuum for prairy dogs in some Arizona locations - the street sweepers with the big vacuum on the back of a pickup. However they have been in trouble with the animal rights folks lately. The best way I know of, and I trap gophers as a business, is to use the Cinch gopher trap and the surface trapping method. To find out much more go to my website www.gopherslimited.com.
Best,
Thomas