Weed Control Revolution With See & Spray

Today, the common practice in modern agriculture is to treat all plants as if they have the same needs. But new technology is about to change all that, empowering growers to make every individual plant count at scale.

Meet See & Spray.

We hear the phrase ‘game changer’ a lot these days but See & Spray Select technology really is about to shake up how farmers operate.

Developed by American company Blue River Technology, See & Spray Select uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to detect, identify and make management decisions about every single plant on-farm. And as Sales Operations Manager Andrew Watt says, the result will be a revolution in weed control.
“With the rise of herbicide-tolerant weeds, there are now fewer and fewer effective solutions, with farmers spending billions a year worldwide to keep weeds under control.

“With See & Spray Select, a camera setup with advanced machine learning will identify and spray weeds in real-time and adapt on the go. As it captures imagery it learns what plant is a weed and what plant isn’t a weed, starting off as a fallow ground solution and building in more features in the future.

“The result is up to 90% reduction in chemical, and 77% reduction on average, because See & Spray is only spraying the weeds that it needs to target, rather than doing blanket applications. This will not only boost farmers’ profitability, but it will also benefit and have huge benefits for the environment.”

Andrew explained that John Deere, which acquired Blue River Technologies in 2017, has released See & Spray for ordering across its self-propelled sprayer range.

“There are other third-party companies that have bolt-on solutions on the market right now and they’re quite expensive, starting at about $120,000 on top of the cost of the machines. John Deere is going to be the first to market across all sprayer manufacturers to have a factory solution fully integrated.

“The first limited production build machines will be in-country mid 2021 and Hutcheon & Pearce will have access to one of those in August and we are planning an event to step our customers through this leading-edge technology.

“We’re beyond excited to share this with our customers because it will fundamentally change the way we do things. People spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on chemical and if you can save 90% of that cost, it pays for itself over and over again.

“It also counters that city perception that farmers are the enemy, we’re the bad guys because we use herbicides. This is just another example of the research and development happening in the industry to reduce chemical use.

“For example, we saw the ExactApply™ nozzle technology released a couple of years ago and this was really the last piece of the puzzle from a John Deere factory perspective to get the whole solution where we’ve got individual nozzle control.

“We can control the flow rate of the chemical and for turn compensation, we can only apply the right pressure at the right speeds at the right rates and have that efficacy absolutely perfect. Now, to take that to the next level, the See & Spray Select technology is the game-changer to take us from, ‘Yes, we’re spraying correctly’ to ‘now we only spray the individual plants we need to spray’.

“The economic benefits for the farmer are huge, but it’s also another step forward in full machine autonomy when operators will no longer be in the machine cabs.”

How See & Spray Select works:

• Reduced solution use – by avoiding inefficient traditional broadcast applications and spraying only when weeds are detected, you can reduce the applied volume of herbicide by 77%.
• Greater cost efficiency – 77% spray volume reduction means significantly lower herbicide costs, fewer tendering stops, and more acres covered in a day.
• Broadcast-level control – in testing, the See & Spray Select system consistently sprayed 98% of weeds present, giving you a level of control comparable to traditional broadcast application.
  See & Spray Select also offers a combined spray mode, allowing the operator to set a consistent broadcast rate from nozzle A, then a See & Spray rate for nozzle B. The broadcast application controls smaller, newly emerged weeds, while the larger dose takes care of more mature weeds.

For more information or to see the machine in action, talk to your local Hutcheon & Pearce sales team.