Targeted spraying technologies: Past, present and future

[Music] hello everyone thanks for joining us for another episode of crops tv my name is ryan bergman i work in the department of agricultural and biosystems engineering here at iowa state university today i'm going to talk with you about some targeted spraying technologies we're going to review where these technologies came from in the past where they're at presently and where they're going in the future we're going to start with some introductions of some basic terminologies around these technologies that are important to know in order to competently talk about these technologies with others then we'll talk about you know just like we said where they where they came from where we're at today and where we're going we're going to talk about some key requirements and different drivers and benefits for wanting to employ these technologies in our operations we'll review the impacts that they could potentially have to our crop production practices here in the midwest and across the world and finally we're going to talk through how to set different types of technologies up and evaluate them for your operations for your customers and for the folks that you commonly work with on a daily basis so to start with i think it's important to understand and review why do we need targeted spring why are so many folks interested in this type of technology and wanting to you know advance towards this in the in the application industry so first off we're constantly dealing with pest resistance here in iowa you know most recently we're dealing with a wide amount of water hemp resistance that continues to be problematic for many of our growers and agronomists and you know suppliers across the state secondly pesticide costs continue to increase most of these products aren't becoming any cheaper we continue to need to put more products in the tank to get effective control of the target pests that we're after and so that costs us a significant amount of money so the opportunity to potentially reduce costs and increase our bottom line is always appealing to a lot of folks next is environmental sustainability by employing technologies like this we can start to reduce our negative environmental footprint and and this is starting to be demanded more and more by our customers we know folks are wanting to see you know more sustainable products and this is you know just one piece of of that to try to get towards a more sustainable future in agriculture finally and potentially most importantly is just offering us greater flexibility and more options with our herbicide applications in agriculture row crop production by employing technologies like this that might give us the opportunity to change our herbicide plans change up our timing practices of when we want to spray and just gives us you know different options and flexibility that we maybe didn't have in our operations before so there's different types of systems out there uh you know they're what we're going to have tomorrow is going to be very different than what we might have available today a couple of basic terms that are often used in this industry and if you start reading up on different targeted spraying technologies you'll often hear these terms used the first is green on brown capabilities or green on brown spraying and this is referring to spraying anything green in a typical fallow ground environment so essentially on a bare field we're going to go out and spray anything green you know that we view as living out there this technology isn't as applicable here in the midwest to row crop production we don't typically manage a lot of fallow ground here and so we probably won't see wide scale adoption of these systems however in other parts of the country and other parts of the world they do often manage a large amount of fallow grounds year to year and so the ability to you know maintain weeds and keep weeds off that ground while still reducing herbicide use is you know a huge driver for this technology finally and where i think we're going to continue to see a lot of growth is in the green on green technology and this refers to identifying and spraying a targeted weed you know where there's other green stuff around you know typically that other green stuff would be the crop that we're trying to grow and so being able to distinguish a weed or a target pest from the crop that we're trying to grow and then prescriptively spray just that weed you know is is really the future of this technology and this is likely where we start to see the most impact to our midwest and our iowa crop production practices is with green on green technologies so where we're coming from in the past the idea of just targeted uh spraying or just spraying the pest that we're after isn't necessarily new for various reasons we've done this in the past and uh and you know this is this is truly just an older version of what we're after today and a more you know maybe a less efficient version of what we're after today so we had this type of technology where we might manually go out and dose weeds or pull weeds and you know that idea is still very similar to what we have today where we're targeting just the weed trying to minimize uh you know over application on the crop and and really get to the weeds in a timely manner this technology's really been around for quite a while most people think that you know this has really been something that's come about in the last five years and that's not necessarily the case a lot of the first systems started to be introduced and started to gain uh you know publicity and around the 1990s really we really saw some systems start to come around in this space in 1999 you know one of the main systems that we see today in the the green on brown space is the weedit system and they were founded in the netherlands in 1999. in 2007 uh 2009 we started to see a lot of adoption in australia this is notable because a lot of times australia will sort of lead what we see for agriculture here in the united states they often face a lot of problems before we do and so we can learn by paying attention to what they do and how they deal with issues and their production systems and uh you know the late 2000s uh you know 2015 2020 we started to see more global adoption in this space we started to see a lot of companies announce that they had research interests in this space mergers and acquisitions were taking place as companies were actively trying to you know invest themselves in this technology to make sure they could compete in this space in the future finally i think it's worth noting uh this year in 2021 john deere released a product they call sea and spray select and this is a green on brown uh spraying system that they released for their uh for their sprayers from the factory i think what makes that notable is just that that it's from the factory this is the first you know large oem manufacturer that we've seen you know provide targeted spraying system on their machines from the factory in the past these systems you know have had a lot of different limitations to them though so they often required very stable booms uh and slow speed so we would often see these systems on a a trailed type sprayer with you know maybe ground engaging dolly wheels on the boom to ensure that we're placing that boom and the sensors on there that we're placing them in a way that they they have a really good opportunity to see that weed and that we're going slow enough that we have the a good opportunity to process the data that we're taking in and then turn on a nozzle and get product all the way down to that weed these systems in the past were almost always green on brown technology you know we just we haven't in the in the past seen much green on green space or green on green technology in this space with was often limited uh just due to power and cost so we m we typically didn't see these on 120 foot self-propelled sprayer boom for for several reasons it was the technology was very expensive it's still expensive today but it was even more so uh you know 10 years ago and then power a lot of times you know these sensors that we're using the the controllers to actually compute and make decisions about what the data the sensors are bringing in and then actually fire a nozzle these are all power intensive operations that can require a lot of electricity and oftentimes our machines were just physically limited by the amount of electricity that was available on board to actually function and operate these types of systems so where we're at today we see adoption today on you know both toad implements like what we just talked about as well as on self-propelled sprayers you know those are becoming more of a common sight to see in this space we see technologies using both optical and fluorescence-based technology so on the left here i have a picture uh from john deere of their cn spray select system which is using an optical camera-based system to view and identify weeds versus the weed-it system that's shown on the bottom which is using a fluorescence light based system to reflect light back and identify where there's green and and then turn on nozzles to effectively cover that green area on the ground we've seen with grow as well in this space we're seeing you know uh this is very capable today to put on 120-foot machines we have better computing power we have better boom control systems out there today to allow us to better position that boom to ensure that we're giving the sensor the best possible chance to um to identify the weed and then finally better computing power to help us you know process those images faster and actively spray the weeds precisely and accurately in the future we're likely going to see you know grow the the green on green technology space continue to grow and this will start to have an impact in in row crop production here in the midwest as well as across the world the ability to identify you know spray and and map based on weed type or other other properties that we might care about has been discussed by a lot of manufacturers as we go around to trade shows and farm shows around the world this is a common uh common topic that we see is you know companies demoing technology that they're working on and talking about the types of data that they're able to record and things that they can uh learn uh that that eventually hopefully they'll be able to apply to production machines and production agriculture we'll likely need to see continued improvements to boom control and operating speeds of these systems so as this starts to go on as customers in production agriculture we're going to continue to demand better technology and we're also going to want that technology to work at faster speeds and so that's going to require continued improvements uh you know in boom height control systems to again make sure we're placing that sensor and those nozzles in a position where they can truly be successful and operating speeds to to further push productivity enhancements of these systems so before we go on i want to talk through a couple different operating modes of a lot of these systems i think it's worth noting that these systems don't just operate in you know a targeted spraying mode all the time most of these have additional flexibility pieces uh you know to ensure that you can use them across a broad number of acres in various operations so of course these systems have a systems have a targeted mode right where we can identify weed and spray just the wheat you know that's the critical piece of the technology that we're really after and that's what we want to use and that's where we're going to save the most money and really pay for these systems a lot of manufacturers out there are advertising that they have the capability to do a targeted plus a light rate so what this might mean is we're putting out a light rate across all the nozzles on the boom so think a very you know kind of low carrier volume maybe a lower concentration of product that we're putting out across the across the entire width of the machine this is really targeted at you know hitting and controlling really small weeds weeds that just emerge weeds that maybe we will miss with the sensing capabilities on these machines just because they're so small or they might still be you know covered up by a piece of soil or a piece of residue that's in our field and we won't be able to see them so we're putting out that light rate and then simultaneously we can still look and try to detect where there's large weeds in the field and then we'll give those large weeds an extra dose of product where we know that white rate wouldn't be effective on those weeds we can up the up the carrier rate up the product and really give those weeds a harder dose to ensure that we get good control of them finally most of these technologies can all still be used in a broadcast mode so if you don't have the you know you can't spot spray for whatever reason uh you know in a field or an environment then you can default back to a broadcast application or if you're doing some sort of fertilizer type application you know you still have that ability to go back and use the machine in that type of a scenario as well moving forward in the future i think it's also worth thinking about how does autonomy and drone applications play into the space so from an autonomy perspective you know we still still see a lot of companies exploring this space you know the the example i have here is the what was the raven dot machine and uh you know they've since renamed that and that's been acquired now by uh cnh so there's some probably some name changes and such there but um you know the idea that this machine you know can still have a really nice width right maybe 90 120 feet but you know maybe this machine goes a little bit slower that could have some real implications to see in spray technology if we have an autonomous machine maybe we're not as worried about pushing the the speed boundaries of these systems and we can let these autonomous machines slow down and really do a good job at trying to to do a targeted spraying application with that you know think through the tending setups right how are you gonna tend you know an autonomous sprayer and those types of things are all questions that we get asked and are really worth thinking about in this sort of environment the next is drone applications so we see this today there's you know companies in the state of iowa companies across the country that are actively exploring using uav and drone technology to apply pesticides or apply dry products to to production agriculture fields i think these make a ton of sense you know for tight to reach spaces right maybe wet areas of a field small areas where it just doesn't make sense to get a large self-propelled sprayer into and we're going to continue to see that type of application and adoption grow in these systems but also we're thinking about what might this uh you know uav sprayer drone sprayer be able to do if it was able to you know just prescriptively apply product to certain areas or even identify you know where there's problematic areas of a field and then just go apply to those areas instead of you know doing a broadcast application which is still very typical what we see with you know even drone uav technology today so a couple of uh considerations for adoption here so this is these are very technology heavy and intensive products so this is uh you know we're adding a lot of sensors to a machine a lot of wiring and wire harnesses a lot of different controllers to a machine that's worth noting and understanding you know as you're starting to think about how this might fit into your operation you know in the future and again we're not talking about these products you know being adopted next year here in the midwest um you know before we truly have green on green uh you know widespread adoption you know we're probably talking five to ten years is when i want you to think about you know how these technologies and and what to consider in that sort of time frame these systems require individual nozzle control that's sort of a given if we're going to only turn on you know one nozzle two nozzles at a time to target a specific weed we've got to have a way to do that so we've talked about individual nozzle control in the past and there's a lot of benefits that can come along with with that technology as well and and that's sort of a pre-requirement to having targeted spraying technology is having a system to do individual nozzle control i want folks to think about you know how much uh spraying do you do in the daytime versus at night time right and how do the different systems how are they able to handle that and address those types of different environments also think about kind of the twilight hours right these systems you know most of them like we talked about are using optical you know image sensing or even even the systems that use light there can be challenges with you know transition periods in the day changes in cloud cover and lighting can affect that so think through how you typically spray and how might these systems uh you know how much you need to change or set these up depending on you know the type of day that you're dealing with uh when you're spraying also there's going to be other features that we want today or we want with targeted spraying systems that just aren't on our machines today a lot of these aren't even on our radar today we're not thinking about these features on our machines today because we don't really have a need to there's a lot of benefits to some of these that you know could benefit us today um but they're just they're not on our radar but they will be in the future as we start to look at how targeted spraying technologies might be a part of our operation again in the five to ten year type time frame so we're going to start to talk through how could this technology impact you and how might this impact and be a benefit to your operation your clients your customers so we're going to need to adjust our herbicide plants you know i think it's a given that we're hopefully going to save uh save product with these right we'll use less pesticides so in doing so that should give us an opportunity to maybe use better products right maybe we can put more modes of action in the tank you know have a more complete uh prescription that we can put on on weeds to ensure that we're getting really good control when we do turn a nozzle on and target a specific weed most people realize that if we're only spraying a small percentage of the area in a field we're going to save quite a bit of time due to less tending of the machine we're not going to have to be filling as often because we're not going to be spraying as much product so how are we going to use that extra time we can certainly cover more acres in a day and maybe that means we even spray a field multiple times or more times throughout the year than what we do today and while that may seem somewhat counterproductive i want you to think about the opportunity to really try to target a weed when it's most susceptible to the herbicide products that we're trying to use and put out there so we all know that it's typically easier to kill a small you know two inch tall water hemp than it is to kill that six or eight inch tall water hemp so by getting out there more often we're going to be able to hopefully get better results even with the herbicides we have available today by targeting those smaller weeds and that's one way we could potentially use the time savings that we'll get with this technology you know to just really better our weed control in our and our agricultural operations maybe we can use this technology uh since we're not filling up as often we're not spraying as much maybe we can apply higher rates of a higher concentrations of the herbicide products and maybe higher carrier volumes to get better coverage so we know that you know many weeds are susceptible to the rate of the product you put out the concentration of that product but also the the general um you know level of coverage you get certain products have to have really good coverage so if we're not worried about how often we have to fill the tank maybe we can put out a higher uh volume of product to ensure that we're getting good coverage the ability to spray higher rates of a product or higher concentrations you know has been demonstrated in other parts of the world and has had decent success in some areas but it's worth noting that's going to take uh you know label changes right to do that the label is the law and we have to legally follow that and so this is an example of where you know it's going to take some regulatory updates to really match and allow us to adapt to this new technology that's going to become available in the future i want folks to think about and consider different types of owners of the machines and you know who owns this type of technology and utilizes it so one example is you know co-ops and service providers right how might they own this technology and utilize it to provide value to their customers uh the next is you know farmers and folks that maybe do a little bit of custom work on the side right how are they gonna own this and and pay for it and provide value to themselves and their customers and then finally you have just farmers that might want to own this right and how are they going to look at this system how are they going to cost flowing through their operation and uh and ensure that they can can get a good return on investment for these so i like to um you know this is similar to like what we see with variable rate technology and a lot of dry fertilizer equipment today right where if you want a variable rate oftentimes there's an up charge for that type of technology and so this is a great example where we might see that with uh with these types of systems in the future the cost of adoption is certainly uh can be high with these systems right most the time i think you know on like a self-propelled 120 foot boom you know you're going to be looking at easily a six figure you know hundred thousand dollar plus type of upgrade option uh like we talked about there's there's just a lot of technology a lot of extra hardware that has to go in the into this but also just a lot of time that these companies have invested in developing and ensuring that these products work and do a good job that those costs have to be have to be accounted for so uh you know there's different ways to look at this right so you could as we've talked about you can get a machine from the factory today that has this technology you know built into it and a really integrated option that a lot of folks will want to have that's one way to do it alternatively you could also upgrade an older machine and this is actually as we've had experiences and talked with folks you know throughout the country here that have you utilized these systems this is uh this is often an option that they like to do so the idea of you know you go find an older machine that has several thousand hours on it and you know it's starting to maybe be more a little more prone to having problems right you might take it you outfit it with a targeted spraying package on that machine and then a lot of times that's all that machine will do is do targeted spraying and the reason for that is it's kind of a cushy end of life you know job for that machine right and targeted spraying we're not pushing as much volume through the machine we're not typically going as fast you know all of those things come into play and really kind of make it a cushy job for a machine that has a few hours on it and then you can save and have a you know a newer machine maybe that you know costs a little you know you buy new from the factory maybe it doesn't have this technology but that remains a broadcast machine that might do your high rate fertilizer some of those types of things that can just be really hard on this type of technology when you expose it to you know chemicals and fertilizers and machines operating at a high rate of speed so we can kind of protect that large investment in that sort of scenario by putting it on an older machine and really limiting it to only doing those targeted spraying acres we briefly talked about payback before you know there's there's different ways that folks are going to want to pay for these systems right and how they're going to going to look at the return on these so as a grower right we're going to we're going to look a lot at herbicide savings right how much are we saving on products that we put out there and that's going to be a key way that we pay for this we talked about folks that are doing custom work they might have an additional technology fee that they can put on top of their um you know typical rate to do these types of to have this type of technology available to their customers who would then still receive some benefits of this by by having to pay for less product to go out through that custom application we've also heard the idea that this could be a kind of a sell a result or outcome based type pricing right where you know i think this is many years down the road probably with the idea that you know someone's not necessarily just selling you a herbicide plan for the year right they might try to sell you you know a 99.5 weed free field and you know however they achieve that sort of up to them and this this uh targeted spraying technology might be a tool in their toolbox that they use to achieve that outcome and and can help them you know be competitive in that space and hopefully you know make a profit on their on their business the potential for cost savings is certainly high with these systems so we know that herbicide prices are significant and you know we don't typically see them you know coming down in the near future i've got kind of an example here this is a kind of an iowa midwest example and again i want to reiterate these technologies really don't apply here today right you know we really only have green on brown options available today and uh so this this scenario is a little bit based in the future right think about five to ten years from now when maybe we have green on green technologies as kind of a mainstream option and you know row crop production agriculture here in iowa so today uh or 2021 the estimated cost of crop production you know corn herbicides were about forty dollars an acre and soybean herbicides were about fifty dollars an acre so if we think about a 5 000 acre farmer or you know someone is spraying 5000 acres let's say that's a 50 50 split between corn and soybeans and let's just use a very conservative you know average savings of 30 percent across you know all their applications now this isn't necessarily uh you know true because on our previews we may still need to broadcast residuals we'll have to you know we'll have to work in in some of those pieces but let's use a conservative number of 30 percent to start with and you know if we can save 30 across those 5 000 acres uh for corn and soybeans you know we could easily be talking 30 000 on corn and you know 36 37 000 savings on soybeans just in you know saved herbicide costs so the the opportunity here is big even though we know these numbers may not be quite right you know really using this to just illustrate that the opportunity is big as we've had opportunities to be exposed to these systems over the last several years you know it's not unrealistic we see systems ranging in herbicide savings you know in fields from 15 to 90 percent herbicide savings the amount of savings really directly correlates to weed pressure right you can't go out to a really weedy field where there's weeds everywhere and expect that you're going to save 90 on on the herbicide use right that's just not not realistic but if we have you know some ground where we just have a few weeds but there we know they're really invasive weeds potentially resistant weeds we know we need to get out there and control them you know the ability to go out and only spray the 10 percent the 15 of that field where we have those weeds you know can really demonstrate a huge savings in these in these environments now that was with uh 30 savings right let's you know again thinking five to ten years in the future what if what if these systems could save you eighty percent on your corn and soybean herbicide use right how would that impact your operations and how would that you know give you new new flexibility and new opportunities uh within your production operations wanna take a minute and step back uh you know and really reiterate that you know this isn't a silver bullet right this is a new tool in the toolbox but we're still relying on herbicides as the way of controlling weeds and so product efficacy still matters in general you know ipm integrated pest management strategies still apply right we still have to be making sure we have a good plan to control these weeds with multiple different uh you know ways of doing that in our operation also we've uh you know you won't see every weed we cannot expect these systems to see a hundred percent of the weeds that exist in our field today i think most of us would argue from you know just being in in this space and you know having boots on the ground with a good broadcast application with the right nozzle on a machine you know it's very realistic that we can get product on 100 of the weeds in the field now notice i said get product right think they're you know we don't typically get 100 control of all the weeds in the field right we have things like herbicide efficacy and you know did we get good coverage and what were the environmental conditions i'll play into you know how many of those weeds actually do we get control of but one thing we think about is if we can't see a weed we can't spray or weed right and all of this comes into play you know we might have weeds that are nested under a piece of residue like what i'm showing in this picture here depending on how the machine comes and approaches that weed there's a very realistic possibility that that corn stock there is going to shield the weed from that machine seeing it and that if we can't see it there's no way that we can activate a nozzle and effectively spray that weed so we've got to think through how do we deal with those types of situations right and how are we going to manage those in our operation with this type of technology in the future we've also got to be able to evaluate and trust the system so uh you know this is going to be new technology to most folks when it starts to come around and we know that in the agriculture space you know we we don't necessarily want to take a lot of risk especially with things like this that can you know be problematic for us for years to come so one thing we found over the years is uh you know using dyes in the tank um to actually go out and validate that these machines are working so a couple uh you know examples here one is you know you can see little die specs on the weeds themselves sometimes that's easier than others to see those those bits of dye on the weed but you can also oftentimes see it on residue around the wheat and we've illustrated that with the the uav photo on the right that you can actually see the blue haze around a lot of weeds out in that photo and so being able to you know do exercises like this and prove to yourself and prove to the customers that the technology is working and doing what it should you know it can be a really powerful uh way to go about and start to learn in this space over time we've also learned you know as you're you're just getting your feet wet in this space it's a lot easier to do this with just water first right so think about even maybe you know doing part of a field or a demo with customers and doing that with just water in the tank and we know just water and dye so that way it's really easy for you to walk out there and have those conversations with people without having to worry about all the safety issues that come with walking through a field that just had freshly applied herbicides you know in it this can also be a really cool way to evaluate different machine settings maybe different nozzles that you want to use on the machine and really understand you know what are the different knobs that you can turn on these systems what do those mean on the ground in terms of coverage in terms of you know good weed control in terms of the overall amount that you're spraying right and evaluate you know where do you want to operate this type of technology in your operation there uh there's various methods that have been used to try to you know evaluate this type of technology we've been working on some of our own methods here at the university for the last several years to try to evaluate and really look at what does success mean in these operations or how well is a system doing compared to a broadcast or compared to another system that's out there today these are something that hopefully are going to start to be published over the next uh you know several years as these systems start to become more mainstream we know that folks are going to want to get their methodologies out there and publish so that others can use them and we and that also allows us to use the same sort of measuring stick to evaluate performance and success by so that that's a critical piece to understanding and comparing different systems or different setups uh you know from one area of the country to another even one day to the next uh locally is making sure that we're using the same measuring tools uh typically i like to talk about looking at evaluation and kind of two different uh two different ways so the first is uh using die to truly evaluate how well did the system do at getting uh you know getting product on the wheat right that's the first thing that we have to do is we have to be able to sense the weed activate a nozzle and get product on that weed right and so that's kind of the the first piece of it right is do we get product on it and and you know what is that how well the machines perform in that sense finally this is typically done you know days later maybe a week to 10 days later is evaluating how well did the technology and the herbicide plan you put together how would that do it actually eliminating you know a live weeds out in the field and so we call this you know going back and evaluating the density of living weeds after the herbicide application looking at you know how many weeds are still out there and alive today and and that's another piece of this that's important to to evaluate and really truly understand the full agronomic story that can come with these types of technologies today uh we often see performance of these systems again mostly talking about you know green on brown systems right because that's uh pretty much all that's commercially available today that we've been able to see in different parts of the country you know it's realistic that we see documented performance of you know hitting 95 to 99 percent of the weeds right and again you know we're talking about getting product on those weeds so you know the ability for the machine to sense and apply product to you know 99 plus percent of the weeds is a realistic expectation when the machines are properly set up uh that setup piece is critical right uh you know there is opportunity that we can not get it right on a day and you know what happens if we have a setting wrong or we use the wrong nozzle or there was you know too much wind on a day right that can all impact our ability to get good coverage of the product on the weed we also see product savings you know again directly quarterly to the weed pressure in the field but it's not unrealistic to see 15 to 90 plus percent product savings in different uh different scenarios in different environments and you know those can have a huge impact to cost uh into logistics and really to the bottom line of many operations you know again i want to hit on performance is limited by a lot of things right so machine settings you know often these are called different sensitivities in the machine right and we can we can turn those knobs and adjust those but performance is also going to be impacted by the herbicides you choose the rates that you're applying those herbicides at the ambient lighting around on the day the size of the weeds you're trying to hit the type of nozzles that you have on the machine right all of those things are going to come into play and will have a role in determining how successful these technologies are moving forward so i want to talk about productivity this is a piece of it we've mentioned it a couple times and i think it's worth you know digging into just a little bit here so uh it's very common kind of or common knowledge you know a typical self-propelled sprayer you know often spends we kind of use the rule of thirds often spends about a third of its time spraying a third of its time tending and a third of its time in in transport mode right moving from field to field uh but we only get paid for the spraying portion right typically on a self-propelled sprayer whether it be a co-op machine right where we're getting paid you know a certain dollar for every acre that we cover with that machine or a grower where we're trying to get over you know a certain number of acres per day right those are the that's the piece of that equation that really matters is the percent spent spraying so targeted spraying systems uh you know have a benefit here right we're gonna spend less time tending we're not gonna be pushing near as much product through these machines and so we'll spend less time in that tending category so maybe we can move some of some time from the tending bucket to the spraying bucket and allow us to be more productive with a given machine it's also worth noting if we if we're covering more acres per day though there's a chance that we could increase our transport time right if we're covering more acres that means we might hit you know one or two extra fields a day and we're gonna have to drive to those fields and so we might we might also increase our transport time a little bit which isn't necessarily a good thing in these cons of these systems are certainly there as well so you know especially here early on right we may not be able to spray at the typical speeds we typically operate at today so you know we might only be able to spray up to 12 maybe 15 miles an hour where it's not unrealistic today that we see self-propelled sprayers operating at you know 18 20 miles an hour in a field and again we've talked about it but we may need to spray or want to spray more often right to again really target those weeds when they're in a good susceptible state and so that may also you know play a factor into just how productive and how we utilize uh you know every hour of a machine with this type of technology i want you to think about logistics planning right how does this play into to the logistics of your operation right one of the biggest hurdles that you know many folks you know have to overcome when they start using this is you don't know how much how many acres you're going to spray right you don't know what percentage of that 100 acre field you're going to spray right are you going to spray 10 percent or 10 acres you're going to spray 50 or 50 acres of that 100 100-acre field so we have to you know get good at estimating how much product we're going to need and you know we might overestimate or underestimate how much product we need to load into the machine how are how's your chemical suppliers how is yourself going to go about you know doing your planning for the year of your chemical supply right if we don't know exactly how many acres we're going to spray on we may not accurately know how many uh gallons of a certain product we need to order and have on hand right so that's going to be a piece that we're going to have to start to figure out and deal with over time is just the the overall supply chain of of pesticides within the agriculture industry as we talked about not only you know timing's critical right to getting good control on a weed and it's going to continue to be more critical in the future also as we start to think about green on green technologies and i want you to think about how does the crop canopy start to play into that right if you know we are able in five to ten years to go out and sense weeds within the crop canopy of the desired crop we're growing uh you know how does that canopy affect our ability to maybe see weeds that are down in the row or you know underneath that soybean or that corn leaf right and how does that impact when we might want to target spraying that field depending on what the crop canopy looks like nozzles are also likely going to be different in the future so today we often rely on you know really wide angle broadcast nozzles that have overlapping edges and you know maybe put out less at the edges but we know we're going to get overlap from the neighboring nozzle those are very common nozzles that we use today these likely won't be the nozzles we want to use in the future right if we're only turning on a couple nozzles to spray a weed we may want to concentrate that product right in that area we may not want to have a a tapered nozzle where we're putting out you know varying amounts at the edges versus in the center you may want to have more of an even or use like a banding nozzle right where we're getting a really defined concentrated area of product you know right where we believe that that weed is at you know today it's not unrealistic you know we have like 100 110 120 degree nozzles and just to illustrate that i've got this chart here that shows you know even at like a 36 inch boom height right that nozzle might easily be covering 80 80 plus inches on the ground right that we're spreading that nozzle out over 80 some inches you start to think about that that necessarily doesn't make sense when we talk about you know the ability to really target and control an individual weed and so that's what will drive some considerations around what types of nozzles we want to use with this this technology in the future again it's worth noting here you know a lot of times we're restricted on the nozzles we use by the label again the label is the law and so this is another area where we might we might need to see changes in the product labels you know to really support and allow us to effectively adapt to this technology in the future we've talked about it a little bit already but um you know boom height control will argue is very critical today right we need good boom height control to ensure we're getting good coverage and good efficacy of the products we put out there and it's going to be more even more critical tomorrow so as we start to see these systems continue to become more common these systems start to get more accurate they start to travel faster through the fields having good and more accurate boom height control is going to be even more critical than what we see it today again this really comes back to ensuring that we have a really steady platform or boom uh to to sense those weeds and apply product from right if our boom's moving all over the place that's going to make it really hard for the sensors to sense the the desired weeds out there and and for the nozzles to really effectively get product on those weeds so again i've got this chart here that illustrates you know how nozzle coverage depends on boom height right and i just want to use that to drive that point home that depending on where we put that boom right that can have a drastic impact to where we put the product on the ground and that's really important to consider as we start to talk about targeting specific areas on the ground uh moving forward also you know beyond uh targeted spraying technology i just think we're going to generally can uh continue to see a drive towards lower boom heights so there's a lot of environmental reasons why we like lower boom heights they uh you know are less prone to drift right we get the product closer to the ground um you know there's just there's less time to evaporate ooze particles between when they discharge the nozzle and when they get down to the weed there's a lot of benefits to that and so i think we'll continue to see boom heights go lower anyway that'll also drive some changes to how we see nozzles placed on the boom as we go lower with boom heights we may need to see our nozzle spacings come in a little tighter too again just making sure that we're getting good good coverage and good control of the weeds on the ground one of the technologies that i think is likely going to be very prominent on these systems in the future is recirculating boom technology so again this is a great example of one of those features of a machine that's you know kind of somewhat available today that we don't think a lot about uh but it will likely be almost standard or at least very common on targeted spraying machines in the future so what these systems do is you know typically on a on a spray boom today right we might feed product through a you know a metal tube from the center and then the nozzles are mounted on that tube and then we spray product from there those systems are typically deadheaded at the ends right and so those dead heads at the ends of our spray boom can allow opportunity for product to become stagnant and build up at the ends of those and we fight that today right those can be our sources of contamination we might get plugged nozzles in those areas of our boom and so these are often issues we fight today but this will be more problematic as we start to talk about targeted spraying machines where we're not pushing out the volume that we typically do or we might go for periods of time where we're not spraying anything out of a certain area of a boom and you know having stagnant product out there with the potential for things to settle out you know is not ideal and so recirculating booms eliminate those dead heads and constantly you know push product out to the boom but then allow product to leave the end of the boom and re-circulate back to the to the solution tank so that we keep everything mixed and in solution which has a lot of implications to product efficacy and just ensuring that we can maintain a nice clean machine with the products we're applying so it'll have some big implications for for targeted spraying for that there's also some other features of this though that are could be valuable and beneficial beneficial to us um you know just in general though so the ability to reclaim products so a lot of these systems can actually allow you to push all the all the remaining product in your boom and push that back to the tank once it's in the tank it might be easier to capture that product in a container and properly dispose of it when we go to primary boom we we get instant boom priming with these systems so because they're constantly circulating we don't have to wait to push all the old product or all the water out of the boom uh before we get the stuff that we mixed up in the tank it's always circulating and so we instantly have uh you know full rate product back at the at every tip of the boom and finally most most systems today we don't worry a whole lot about pressure drop across the boom most systems have gotten pretty good about managing that but you know this system can also help eliminate any remaining pressure drop we might have in our systems and just ensuring that the nozzle in the middle of the machine is operating at the same pressure as that nozzle outed you know 60 feet away at your boom tip so a couple of wrap-up conclusions here so we see large opportunities you know exist to reduce herbicide volumes with these systems also increasing our flexibility um with timing and with our herbicide plants you know and that's that's a key benefit to a lot of these systems these systems are complex you know we're going to acknowledge that up front and we know that this system this technology may not be for everyone because of how complex it is and these machines you know are likely going to take a different uh level of operation and skill just to really ensure that they're operated to the best possible degree testing and evaluation is key to that right to ensuring that we get these complex systems set up and operating right you know good ways of evaluating their performance is going to be a really important thing moving forward in the future we know this technology won't hit 100 of the weeds you know we cannot expect this technology to perform any better than a broadcast herbicide application would today and so we want to think through in five to ten years right what level of effectiveness are you going to be willing to accept right and how do you manage those few weeds that you might not hit in any given application how does that become part of your your production operation and again just want to stress that you know we're still using herbicides with these systems right so they're truly just another tool in our toolbox uh and we still have to pay attention and use you know good pest management strategies to ensure that we're getting good control of weeds and limiting you know resistance buildup so again uh you know we didn't have a lot of data here to present today but i really wanted this discussion to be focused on thinking about how does this impact you your clients your customers your operation you know five to ten years in the future when this technology might become mainstream and and what does this look like and how might you want to utilize this within your operation you know to just gain flexibility and you gain you know good weed control so thank you for having me talk with you today my contact information is here feel free to reach out if you have any questions uh and thanks for watching this episode of crops tv [Music]

2022-05-27 17:46

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