Whether or not you’ve gotten 2 acres, 10 acres or extra, in the event you develop crops of any sort you’re going to wish to take care of weeds. Blanket spraying of any sort of herbicide can negatively have an effect on your soil high quality. And in the event you’re not cautious, spraying might goal crops you’re making an attempt to develop.
John Deere tackled this drawback by growing farm expertise that takes the guess work out of spraying. It’s known as See & Spray™, and the corporate lately received a Better of Innovation award on the Shopper Digital Present (CES 2022) for it.
What’s John Deere’s See & Spray?
John Deere’s See & Spray seems quite a bit like a sprayer attachment to your tractor, but it surely’s way more than that. A robotic with superior expertise on board, the See & Spray makes use of pc imaginative and prescient and deep studying to immediately acknowledge the distinction between your weeds and your crops.
How does it work? Because the sprayer strikes throughout your pasture, a digital camera will scan the realm and detect shade in your subject. It picks out inexperienced crops in fallow land, the sprayer is activated, and it’ll solely goal these weeds particularly.
Meaning it sprays herbicide on a single plant as an alternative of broadcasting it throughout a large space.
In line with John Deere, this focused spraying will imply the typical farmer sprays a mean of 77 p.c much less herbicide. The expertise helps to scale back herbicide resistance as a result of farmers can combine totally different merchandise. They will additionally use costlier merchandise with out as a lot waste.
Learn extra: Are you aware the components of a sprayer? On this video, we break them down.
Spraying Much less Helps the Surroundings
Like different giant firms, John Deere has put a direct give attention to persevering the surroundings and decreasing their carbon footprint. Having a focused herbicide sprayer with the flexibility to acknowledge the distinction between wholesome crops and weeds will scale back one of many largest environmental points farmers face when spraying herbicides—spray drift.
Spray drift happens when spray is airborne and the droplets of herbicide transfer away from the crops you’re spraying. The quantity of spray drift you’ve gotten is affected by
- how massive the droplets are
- wind velocity while you’re spraying
- distance between the nozzle and the plant you’re making an attempt to spray
The design of the See & Spray places the nozzle straight over the plant when the herbicide is ejected. That reduces the probability that any herbicide will get picked up by wind or transferred to a different plant.
If you happen to do need to broadcast spray your crops, the See & Spray will allow you to try this, too. With out even leaving the cab, you may swap from focused spray to broadcast spray. This offers you the choice of masking a bigger space.
Obtainable for John Deere 400 and 600 sequence
The See & Spray is designed for bigger farms. However when you’ve got a John Deere 400 sequence or 600 sequence tractor, you’ll quickly be capable of use this new expertise by yourself fields.
It’s slated to be obtainable this summer time.
Learn extra: John Deere’s new autonomous tractor might be the way forward for farming.
Pair with the John Deere Self-Driving Tractor
John Deere has been busy over the previous few years. Not solely are they launching the See & Spray, however this yr they’ll launch their totally autonomous tractor, the John Deere 8R. The self-driving tractor has six pairs of stereo cameras and synthetic intelligence to scan its surroundings and navigate with out you within the cab.
Think about what it could be prefer to ship the John Deere 8R into the fields with the See & Spray. This might remove hours of labor in a day! And time in a day is one factor farmers all the time want extra of.
