As Michael Gallagher climbs into the cab of his 2019 Hagie sprayer, the boom behind him looks familiar, but how it operates is completely new.
Gallagher, a fifth-generation farmer raising 2,500 acres of corn and soybeans alongside his father, Dennis, in Holly Springs, Iowa, retrofitted his sprayer with SymphonyVision Spot from Precision Planting two years ago. Since then, he says their whole-farm annual chemical bill has dropped 30% to 40%.
“Putting that newer technology on our sprayer allowed us to be a lot more sustainable with our product and do a better job of spraying accurately,” Gallagher says.
Five hundred miles to the southeast, Kentucky grower Jonathan Royster has seen similar bottom-line impacts. Operating 9,000 acres of corn and soybeans with a John Deere See & Spray Ultimate rig, Royster saved $35 per acre on herbicide costs when he was able to use See and Spray for both burndown and post applications. In total, Royster was able to save roughly $100,000 in one season. Across his acres, chemical use plummeted: down 34% in burndown, 51% over-the-top in corn and 65% over-the-top in soybeans.
Whether it’s branded selective spraying, smart spraying or spot spraying, the underlying mission is similar.
“How do we use AI and vision-based technology to transform the way we spray chemicals in agriculture?” asks Nadav Bocher, Greeneye Technology’s CEO and co-founder.
Across the industry, adoption is accelerating. John Deere’s See & Spray machines have covered more than 10 million acres since debuting in 2022, while Greeneye has deployed dozens of systems across 12 states.
Equipment manufacturers report that while chemical savings vary by weed pressure, growers consistently average notable reductions. Greeneye notes average herbicide savings above 80%. Jacob Maurer, a CCA, and the precision marketing manager for New Holland North America, reports 25% to 80% herbicide reduction on its IntelliSense-equipped machines. By using a “base-plus-boost” approach, farmers can maintain a low baseline broadcast rate while cameras trigger targeted bursts only when weeds appear, eliminating skips while slashing waste. John Deere notes that its See & Spray system delivers its highest savings when paired with a strong residual program that limits weed pressure ahead of targeted passes.
The Dual-Tank Revolution and “Batching Blind”
Reaching broad-acre scale, however, required clearing an agronomic hurdle: soil-applied residuals.
Early spot-spraying concepts struggled in corn and soybeans because pre-emerge residual chemistry is non-negotiable; you can’t spot-spray a herbicide that must blanket bare ground to prevent future weed flushes. As Bryce Baker, North American marketing director for PTx, a brand-agnostic retrofit option, points out, commercial adoption unlocked once dual-line systems hit the market, giving rigs the ability to broadcast residual barriers while targeting contact killers strictly onto emerged weeds.
For Royster, that shift eliminated field passes. When testing a single-tank See & Spray Premium system across 1,000 acres, he had to make two trips: spot-spraying weeds first, then following with a second machine to broadcast residual herbicides. Upgrading to a factory dual-tank See & Spray Ultimate combined both tasks into a single pass, but introduced a steep logistical learning curve: managing two separate tanks draining at completely different speeds.
“The dual tanks can be a drawback because you have to fill up more often, and you have to fill each tank separately, which can potentially lower the acres you cover in a day,” Royster explains. He solved the bottleneck by outfitting his tender rig with an iPad-controlled automated batching system hooked directly to his chemical totes.
Even with single-tank retrofits, learning how to mix chemicals poses an operational challenge. In standard broadcast operations, a grower mixing for 80 acres comes home empty after 80 acres. In spot spraying, targeted nozzles stretch that same volume across unpredictable distances.
“The hardest thing to adapt to is knowing how much to spray,” Gallagher says. “When I load up 80 acres worth but I spray 220 acres because my product is able to go so much further, it takes time to learn. Instead of filling up my sprayer 100% and loading up 80 acres, if I’m going out to do 100 acres, I probably only need 20 acres of product.”
Starving the Weed Seed Bank
As camera technology sharpens, growers are discovering the value of smart spraying goes beyond chemical savings.
System capabilities continue to advance: Greeneye’s platform logged weed-detection accuracy above 98% this year, while John Deere’s latest Gen 2 camera system detects four times as many weeds measuring 1/4 inch or smaller compared to earlier iterations.
With that level of precision, growers are taking the dollars saved on chemical volume and reinvesting them into higher-tier, multi-mode-of-action contact herbicides. John Deere notes that its system delivers its greatest savings when paired with a strong residual foundation that keeps weed escapes small and manageable.
The slashed volume also opens the door to late-season “clean-up” passes that would have been cost-prohibitive with full-boom broadcast rates.
“With spot spraying, I can go back for a third application pass, probably only spray 2% to 3% of the field, but take care of killing the weeds to keep them from going to seed,” Gallagher says. “That’s huge for my weed-seed bank. The herbicides we’re using are not going to lose their efficacy; they’re going to stay effective longer.”
The technology’s data trail is yielding unexpected dividends in the off-season, too. By capturing high-definition weed-pressure maps during summer passes, systems such as SymphonyVision and John Deere Operations Center log historical escape hotspots.
Instead of blanketing a flat pre-emerge rate the following spring, growers can generate variable-rate residual prescriptions — laying heavier chemistry down on weed-heavy zones and backing off clean acres. Gallagher built a variable-rate plan last winter specifically to target persistent pressure zones this season.
“I was putting on more pre-application at a higher rate that was more expensive where I had weed seed pressure last year,” he says. “Once we can map something, it gives us more data we can use to understand our farms better and apply inputs in a smarter way.”
The Balance Sheet: Subscriptions, Retrofits and ROI
While farmers are reaping agronomic and financial benefits, equipment manufacturers have taken contrasting paths when pricing the technology.
For John Deere See & Spray, customers purchase the hardware package through their dealer and pay a recurring $5-per-acre software subscription for the vision-actuation feature.
“That cost eats into your chemical savings,” Royster acknowledges. “A larger operation may be better positioned to spread out the cost and see enough chemical savings to get a return on investment. But even with the subscription, there is still a substantial saving on every acre when using the technology.”
Greeneye operates on an equipment-ownership model with no recurring per-acre software fees. “When you buy it, you own it,” Bocher says.
Greeneye’s complete retrofit package — which includes a new proprietary aluminum boom, cameras, installation, training and warranty — is currently priced at $255,000 through January 2027. Greeneye reports that customers on 2,000 to 3,000 acres typically reach full return on investment in 18 months through chemical savings alone, with some operations saving more than $500,000 to date.
For Gallagher, retrofitting an existing machine provided the ideal entry point without taking on the capital expense of a brand-new sprayer.
“Number one, you’re always going to get farmers who are price-driven — saving 30% to 40% on chemicals goes a long way on a per-acre basis,” Gallagher says. “Number two, it controls the seed bank. Number three, it’s environmental stewardship. We’re not just throwing chemicals out there where we don’t need it.”
