Revolutionizing Organic Weed Control: Our Experience with the Flame Weeder

Watch out weeds. Here we come.

This week, we trialed our new Flamewerks Flame Weeder on the back of our tractor.

That’s right. We fight weeds by burning them.

Want to see how it works? Watch this:

Three burner units or baskets are mounted on the back of a steel frame, which hitches up to our tractor. The baskets are movable so you can directly target a specific zone on the bed. The tanks are powered by propane gas. With a flip of a switch the burners turn on and blast hot flames onto the surface of the bed, immediately killing any weed seed.

What’s really cool is that our farm is paying for it thanks to a grant we received from Chipotle in the amount of $6410 through their Local Farmer Grant Program. This grant initiative is part of Chipotle’s commitment to cultivating a better world. In partnership with Local Line, Chipotle launched the Local Farmer Grant Program to support sustainability efforts at local farms near their new restaurant locations opening in 2024. The grants aim to bolster these farms’ sustainability projects and enhance their overall impact on the environment. Local Line (our farm’s e-commerce platform) nominated Shared Legacy Farms to receive this grant, and we were just notified this week that we won! Surprise! We hope to use a portion of the proceeds to help cover the cost of our flame weeder, as an example of a more sustainable, innovative way to organically manage weeds without the use of chemicals.

Flame weeding has been around since the 1940’s. (Read this article “History and Principles of Flame Cultivation” to learn more).

Kurt has used this strategy on a small scale for the last few years with our carrot beds using a backpack flame-weeder. It’s just as scary as it sounds — a propane tank mounted on your back, connected to a torch that you aim by hand at the weeds one by one. It’s like a modern-day version of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451. We typically flame-weed the carrot beds a day before the carrot seed is scheduled to germinate. In this way Kurt destroys any weeds that might compete with those baby carrot greens that emerge from the soil. (We’ve learned the hard way that if we miss the flame weeding window, we often lose the whole carrot crop to weeds. And it’s just not profitable to pay your labor force to tediously weed those carrots).

The Flamewerks Basket Unit is shortening the weeding time to just a matter of minutes, which is safer, cooler, and energy-saving.

Not to mention it makes you feel like you’re flying an F-18.