Vajdik works with his brother-in-law Adam Gurr running Agritruth Research and the family farm at Rapid City, Manitoba. In addition to pre-seed burnoff, they are testing green-on-brown settings to apply fungicide where needed on flowering canola and pre-harvest desiccant where needed on edible beans. Their sprayer also has green-on-green settings to target green weeds in a green crop, but that is a work in progress. “We’re trying to find ways to use the optical system for the whole season,” Vajdik says.

Vajdik doesn’t have formal tech training but did some programming in high school and university, and enjoys exploring technology to make life easier. “I like pushing boundaries.”

In 2022, the farm had fields with drowned out and thin areas. Vajdik wondered how he might use the optical spraying system to target fungicide to only those areas that had enough crop to justify the cost.

With the optical spraying system, cameras mounted every 10 feet along the boom take pictures constantly, and feed them to the computer that divides images into a grid and analyzes each grid for green. Grids that meet the operator threshold for greenness get sprayed. For example, with pre-seed burnoff, a sensitivity of three per cent means that anything green that fills three per cent or more of a grid will get sprayed.

This process of photo, analysis and spray happens in fractions of a second while the sprayer travels 15 mph across the field.

Vajdik figured he could use this for fungicide by setting the sensitivity to 99 per cent. Any grid filled 99 per cent or more with green would be sprayed. Any grid with less than 99 per cent green — perhaps due to smaller, thinner plants or drowned-out areas — would not get sprayed. It was a quick way to isolate thicker areas of the field most likely to provide a return on investment for the fungicide.

They tried it on one canola field in 2022. The field included an Agritruth study on fertilizer rates. “We didn’t want bad disease to skew the data,” Vajdik says. He filled the sprayer for 120 acres and ended up spraying 150, stretching the fungicide across an extra 30 acres. Vajdik says an operator could use the manual touchscreen on-off in drowned out areas, but the automatic option is easier and reduces operator fatigue.

With no drown outs in 2023, he didn’t need that flexibility. On-off fungicide is not necessary when crop is uniformly good (it all gets sprayed) or uniformly bad (nothing gets sprayed.)

With pre-harvest spray of Reglone on edible beans, however, Vajdik again tried the green-on-brown setting. Plants still green got the high rate. Dry brown plants got the low.

The sprayer

Gurr and Vajdik run an Agrifac, made in the Netherlands, mounted with a Bilberry optical system, made in France. Why Agrifac? It had the features they wanted, including a recirculating boom, individually controlled nozzles and super-stable suspension. “You need a perfectly stable boom for the cameras to work. This sprayer was good for our undulating fields,” Vajdik says.

Nozzles are on 10-inch spacing and each has pulse width modulation with a solenoid to control the rate. This feature not only keeps the rate consistent on turns and with varying ground speed, it also provides the rate control needed for optical spraying.

With a recirculating boom, plumbing loops back through the system to maintain pressure along the full length. With individual nozzle shut-off, sprayers with recirculating booms can be primed without spraying. It also aids in complete cleanout. Agrifac introduced this feature to North America; various European and North American sprayer companies followed soon after.

Tom Wolf, sprayer expert and owner of Agrimetrix, is a fan of recirculating booms, individual nozzle control and optical spraying. Says Wolf: “Stephen Vajdik and Adam Gurr have the opportunity to broadcast and spot spray at the same time with this sprayer, applying a low dose across the whole field and a high dose where it sees larger weeds.”

This can also apply to fungicide and pre-harvest applications, as Vajdik has shown.

Green on green

The Bilberry optical spraying system also offers green-on-green and the ability to pick out green weeds in a green crop. Vajdik says it can target broadleaf weeds in cereal crops and grassy weeds in broadleaf crops. Corn is one exception where it can target both broadleaf and grassy weeds in the space between rows.

Vajdik tried green-on-green in one broadleaf field, applying a blanket low rate of herbicide and hitting wild oats with the high rate. But most crops have both broadleaf and grassy weeds, and Vajdik doesn’t see economic sense in going over fields a second time to use the optical system for a targeted spray. “I don’t see much use for green-on-green until we have induction or injection to add chem into the line,” he says. With that feature, the sprayer could target the broad spectrum of weeds with the main tank and use the optical system to give specific weeds a shot of something extra.

Carl deConinck Smith has a R4045 John Deere sprayer equipped with direct injection and optical spot spray. With direct injection, he has a separate tank for the spot spray product and the system injects that second product directly into the spray booms as needed and at variable rates. However, the farmer from Fiske, Sask., still doesn’t see value in green-on-green at this time. “Green-on-green has only 70 to 85 per cent accuracy in targeting weeds within crop,” he says. “Missing 15 per cent of weeds is not good enough.”

He adds that green-on-brown is also only 85 per cent accurate, but tiny weeds missed with a green-on-brown pre-seed can be controlled by the in-crop spray.

Tom Wolf, at his website sprayers101.com, wrote about a new Greeneye sprayer with an optical spraying system as well as a second tank and second boom. The Greeneye sprayer can broadcast a residual product while spot-spraying a post-emergent product in one pass. In the U.S., where farmers are dealing with major threats from glyphosate-resistant weeds, especially Palmer amaranth and waterhemp, the ability to target these weeds with residual products in corn and soybeans makes dual tank green-on-green systems more valuable, Wolf says. “This is the American reality for soybeans and corn,” he says. “There is a slightly less stringent need for that up here at this time.”

Sprayer technology is advancing quickly, and green-on-green algorithms will get better at spotting individual species, not just grassy or broadleaf weeds. One solution, Vajdik says, would be for algorithms to identify key crops and spray every plant that isn’t crop. That will save the program having to identify hundreds of different weed species. Optical spraying systems could also create maps of specific target weeds to target with spot sprays or other integrated actions later in the year, or subsequent years.

The way sprayer cameras see will also improve. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), which senses the greenness of crops, would work really well to assess the fungicide need for individual plants, deConinck Smith says, adding, “That’s where the camera system will be in the future.”

In the meantime, deConinck Smith, like Vajdik, has found ways to expand the use of green-on-brown. For example, he can use it for spraying larger perennial or winter annual weeds in just-emerged canola. With the settings high enough to skip the tiny emerged canola crops, he can apply a high rate of glyphosate to the target weeds without spraying the canola. This is particularly useful if the farm missed a pre-seed burnoff and needs to spray these large weeds with a high rate and as soon as possible.

DeConinck Smith farms over 10,000 acres, and he figures an 8,000-acre farm could pay off the $200,000 to $300,000 cost for an optical spraying system and specialized boom within two years based on the chemical saved for pre-seed burnoff alone.

“If you’re buying a new sprayer, this add-on is a no brainer,” deConinck Smith says.

Wolf says optical spraying systems have matured beyond the original hype. “With these technologies, we overestimate their value in the short term and underestimate in the long term,” Wolf says. “These models are just going to get better and better at detecting weeds. And we will get more innovative. I see a bright future for the technology with people like Stephen and Carl innovating new ways to apply it.”

– Jay Whetter is an agriculture journalist and communications manager for the Canola Council of Canada.

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Those words are no exaggeration. How chemicals are applied on farm fields in developed countries across the planet is poised to change pretty significantly. Growers everywhere will need to prepare for that future.

“Political pressure has grown in regards to farming,” he continued. “It’s driven not just by governments, but individuals and NGOs. And it brings a broad challenge”

Nowhere is that more true than in Europe, so it’s no surprise much of the R&D going on in application equipment is coming, at least in part, from European manufacturers and tech firms. But the pressure is building everywhere. Pending or proposed chemical use regulations are already many and varied.

“In almost every different country we have a national action plan that is being rolled out regarding chemical spraying,” Coopman said. “Canada has a Pesticide Risk Reduction Program. The U.S. has the Integrated Pest Management system, and we could go on for hours. The list of every country or every state almost follows its own routes.”

Coopman was one of three executives speaking to farm journalists at the online press event. And he also had some product news to reveal, as Agrifac moves toward meeting the challenge of a much more restrictive future for chemical application. In partnership with sister company Exxact Robotics, it will introduce 3S, a factory-installed, green-on-green spot spraying option on its 2022 model year sprayers. (Green-on-green refers to the ability of a system to identify weeds in a green, growing crop and selectively spray only them.) Other sprayer brands owned by Agrifac and Exxact Robotics’ parent company, Exel Industries Group, will eventually get the technology too. Those include Apache and Hardi, which are names familiar to North American growers.

“In order to meet the 50 per cent reduction of chemicals and the 20 per cent reduction of fertilizer by 2030 (in Europe), the 3S technology is essential,” Coopman said. “We have entered into a new era of spraying. Achieving 50 per cent reduction in chemicals will be the law in the EU. 3S will be essential in meeting these targets. The U.S. and Canada will follow, not just because the law requires it, but because the economics are better.”

But while Coopman’s firm stands out as one of the first brands out of the starting gate with that level of sophisticated commercial sprayer technology, it’s not surprising that nearly everyone in the application business is chasing the same goal.

In March, John Deere announced it is adding See and Spray Select as an option on its 400 and 600 Series SP sprayers. However, at the moment that remains a green-on-brown technology. (Green-on-brown refers to the ability to identify growing plants only in a fallow field.)

“Fallow ground spot-spraying is only the beginning of the John Deere See Spray journey as we help farmers transition from field, to zone, to row, and now to individual plant spraying,” said Joel Basinger, marketing manager for Deere. “John Deere continues working on future solutions that will meet additional customer needs beyond See Spray Select. These solutions will leverage foundational See Spray technology to provide value for both pre- and post-emerge applications in crops such as corn, soybeans and cotton.”

Then in May, AGCO revealed it, too, is chasing advanced spot spray technology. The company announced it has teamed up with Robert Bosch GmbH, BASF Digital Farming, Xarvio Digital Farming Solutions and Raven Industries to create a sophisticated green-on-green system, and it’s currently involved in a “proof of concept” effort. In other words, it’s in field trials. 

Those trials were taking place in Europe, but the brand said the program would be expanded to include a North American component sometime in 2022.

“This effort is aimed at validating the targeted spraying solutions, delivering a reduction in product use to achieve the same results as broadcast spraying in both pre- and post-emergence with the flexibility of spraying day or night,” said Seth Crawford, senior vice-president and general manager, Precision Ag and Digital at AGCO.

When it comes to developing very sophisticated technology, especially involving artificial intelligence, it’s common for the major brands to look for outside help from specialty tech firms or even relatively new startups, which could then easily be bought and taken into the corporate fold.

“The expertise of each organization will undoubtedly provide industry-changing solutions for some of agriculture’s greatest challenges,” said Dominic Walkes, Raven Applied Technology’s director of strategic initiatives. “This smart spraying proof of concept is the first of many that will aid in advancing solutions for a more sustainable future.”

In the case of spinoff firm Exxact Robotics, Excel Industries Group started that organization especially for the purpose of pursuing tech advancements. “We created Exxact Robotics two years ago, with a mission of breakthrough innovation for each of the Exel Group brands,” said Yves Belegaud, CEO of Exel Industries Group, whose company has now become the third-biggest filer of patents in France.

“Right now it (Exxact Robotics) is a company focused on innovation, specifically disruptive innovation,” said Colin Chaballier, CEO of Exxact Robotics. “We’re located near Paris. We have a team of 25 engineers and PhDs targeting mechatronics and AI perception topics, and they are working with 100 engineers from partner companies.”

Another young startup, Israel-based Greeneye Technology, which claims Syngenta among its list of corporate partners, has launched a retrofittable green-on-green system that is compatible with most major brand sprayers. It held its initial commercial launch in its home country in 2021. Now it’s moving on to North America with limited commercial distribution for 2022. It plans to initially work with midwestern corn and soybean growers before expanding to other states in 2023.

“Crucially, the system is designed to integrate seamlessly into any brand or size of commercial sprayer, removing the need for farmers to invest in new machines,” says the company’s announcement. “It also ensures that precision spraying can be carried out at the same travel speed as broadcast spraying, 20 km/h, ensuring no reduction in productivity for farmers.”

“The next generation of our technology, which is already in development, will also be capable of precisely spraying chemicals such as fungicides and micronutrients, increasing savings to farmers beyond herbicides,” said Greeneye Technology’s CEO Nadav Bocher.

But with systems that rely on pinpoint spray accuracy, sprayer features such as boom stability control will play a crucial role. Said Exxact Robitocs’ Chaballier. “It’s about working with engineers to integrate the equipment onto the boom.”

In-cab integration is big too. The best way to do that, said Chaballier, is to work directly with a sprayer manufacturer to prevent a repeat of the cab clutter that growers experienced a decade ago trying to blend implement electronic control systems with tractors. 

Said Chaballier: “Now the challenge for all manufacturers is to reduce the number of interfaces … All this integration is only possible if you are working with a sprayer manufacturer.” 

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