Sprayer technology

Kill the weeds and save the crops all at the same time with the newest advancements in sprayers.

Kaylene Ballesteros is John Deere’s product manager of See & Spray technology. She says they’re expanding their targeted spray technology from green-on-brown to green-on-green. See & Spray Ultimate can be used in-season for corn, cotton, and soybeans. Artificial intelligence and machine learning allows for pin-point accuracy for determining what’s a weed and what isn’t.

"They take hundreds of thousands of images of weeds and crop at all different stages, all different angles and they teach the computer system ‘this is weed, this is crop’," says Ballesteros. "So, the system knows as it’s going through the field scanning over 2100 square-foot-per-second at a time, it knows this is a crop, don’t spray it. This is a weed, spray it."

There is one camera mounted every one meter across the width of the boom. The new system can also help you save on inputs by offering a dual-product chemical solution.

"So, what this does, is it allows you to independently flow two chemical mixes, or two tank mixes through the plumbing to the nozzles so two-in-one pass," she says. "It helps to battle herbicide resistance. There are tank mixes that cause antagonism so you can’t get quite as aggressive as you’d want to with one tank. And so, the dual product solution system allows a farmer to get more aggressive with those tank mixes."