On Target: John Deere's Latest Green-On-Green Spraying Innovation

When John Deere acquired Blue River Technology in 2017 for $305 million, its See & Spray system was installed on hooded pull-type sprayers that ran up to 4 mph. Since the acquisition, the teams at Blue River and John Deere have worked to integrate the technology on a self-propelled machine, which has resulted in See & Spray Ultimate. 

At field speeds up to 12 mph, across its 120’ carbon fiber boom, See & Spray Ultimate senses and measures weed pressures differentiated from crops (currently corn, soybeans and cotton) and then applies targeted applications of post-emergence herbicides. 
The company says the technology has five key benefits: 

1.    Herbicide savings (up to 80% in post-emergent products)
2.    Less tendering
3.    Land stewardship
4.    Efficiency with small spray windows 
5.    Effectiveness with herbicide resistance

Marcio Neutzling, spraying product management manager at John Deere, says, “It’s difficult to make things simple and easy. This is the challenge we accepted to provide in season, in the row weed control.” 

And simply put See & Spray Ultimate works by, he says, “More weeds, spray more. Less weeds, less spray.” 

There are three core systems to See & Spray Ultimate: new tank system, new boom, and the cameras and vision processing system. 

One key component to the system is the new dual solution system which features two plumbing systems and stainless steel split tanks. This maximizes the spray pass with one machine essentially able to make two passes---broadcast residual herbicide in one tank and non-residual tank mix for targeted applications in the other. 

The tank split setup is either 750 gal/450 gal or 650/350 gal split tanks. 

The boom is the result of John Deere’s 2018 acquisition of Argentinian boom manufacturer King Agro , which has been a leader in carbon fiber. The truss style reduces weight and adds stability. 

There are 36 cameras, and the vision processing units–the brain of the system— total 10 across the boom. 

Neutzling highlights how the integration was necessary to optimize the technology despite the limitations. 

“We can’t speed up the droplet’s fall rate, so everything has been fine-tuned, and we applied the rigorous John Deere processes to test and validate the components for full integration,” he says. “We had to have an ultra-stable boom to know exactly where the weed is. And it has to be stable for the spray to hit it. But our 12 mph travel speed is mostly limited by physics.”

See & Spray Ultimate was in installed on 12 test machines through the end of 2021 (mostly located in the Mississippi Delta, West Texas and the Midwest), with limited production for 2022. For John Deere’s early order program later this year the system is available as a factory option on John Deere 410R, 412R and 612R sprayers. 

The pricing for the See & Spray Ultimate will be decided by the value created for farmers say company leaders. 

“See & Spray Ultimate is going to change the way farmers spray,” says Kent Klemme, VP of Product Development at Blue River Technology. “They will be able to use new chemistries, save product , and have better outcomes with weed control in their fields.”

Individual nozzle control is enabled by the ExactApply technology, and the new BoomTrac Ultimate provides for boom height control. 
For John Deere, this is the first ‘green-on-green’ spraying system where crop is differentiated from weeds. One year ago, See & Spray Select was introduced for fallow ground applications, which deciphered bare ground from green material, only spraying the green. 

Machine operators select the crop they are in as well as the weed size threshold to spray on the Gen 4 display. Then a real-time weed map is generated so they can document weed pressures along with the as-applied map. Reports can be generated showing the percent of a field left unsprayed and calculate product savings. 

Company leaders say this latest introduction is part of the ‘journey’ the company is on toward more refined plant-by-plant management. With artificial intelligence and machine learning driving the progress. 

“See & Spray Ultimate is a great gateway for machine learning for all of agriculture,” Klemme says. 

Yield monitors on combines. Module-building cotton pickers. Automatic row shut off on planters. Now for sprayers, will selective smart spraying systems be the next must-have productivity enablers?