Latest See & Spray edition featured at MAGIE

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Visitors to the Midwest Ag Industries Expo were able to see the third-year evolution of See & Spray technology.

The John Deere exhibit featured the new See & Spray Premium, the next edition in the See & Spray lineup.

The upgrade kit for sprayers uses a vision system powered by artificial intelligence that can help farmers’ grain-cost efficiency and combat herbicide resistance with precise application by only spraying the weeds and not the entire field.

See & Spray Premium is a single tank system that simplifies tendering for the operator. While See & Spray Premium is not dual-product capable, it offers many of the same benefits of sprayers equipped with dual-tank capable See & Spray Ultimate technology.

As the sprayer moves through the field, See & Spray Premium utilizes advanced stability provided by John Deere BoomTrac Pro 2.0. This technology stabilizes the sprayer boom as cameras mounted to the boom capture clear images of the field.

Within milliseconds, a machine learning model uses multiple images captured by the cameras to differentiate weed from crop. Once a weed is detected, a command is sent to the John Deere ExactApply nozzle to spray it.

In addition, See & Spray Premium can be used to generate a weed pressure map for the field that was sprayed in the John Deere Operations Center.

“It’s taking See & Spray technology that we’ve talked about the last several years and putting it on your existing sprayer today. So, a model year 2018 or a newer John Deere sprayer can get that See & Spray technology without that customer having to completely upgrade to a new sprayer,” said Tim Deinert, John Deere marketing manager.

“It has our green on brown technology which is basically spray anything that’s green in fallow fields and then the green on green which is your crop versus weed, identifying the weed and spraying just the weed.

“It adds to our See & Spray journey that we have. We started with See & Spray Select in 2021 which was just your green on brown. Say you combined wheat in June and you want to do a burndown pass in August or September before it freezes and you just want to kill weeds, that’s what that technology is about.

“A year ago we had the See & Spray Ultimate. It’s a dual-product system where you can broadcast a residual out of one tank and target spray out of the other. See & Spray Premium brings that same technology and puts it on your existing sprayer.”

Savings

The technology saves on input costs and enables changes in weed management strategies.

“It saves up to two-thirds in chemicals in a post-emerge pass. It also extends the amount of flexibility to when you can apply a chemical and what you apply,” Deinert said.

“So, there are a lot of growers that could look to put more emphasis on their pre-emerge pass, put on a stronger rate, knowing that they can save money and resources on the post-emerge pass to clean their fields, better yields, have a better return.

“It’s a journey with See & Spray. It’s disruptive. You save two-thirds and that’s a huge thing and changes the game, but also it changes the strategy of how a person can apply chemical in the field.

“If you can keep chemicals separate, for example, because they don’t always play nice, that’s a huge factor. If you can spend more money in a different pass versus the other, you can do that with See & Spray.”