Retailer Takes Selective Spraying To The Field

As one of the first retailers to commercial selective spraying in their agronomic offering, Jeff Crissinger, VP of Agronomy Sales/Marketing at NuWay-K&H Cooperative shares how they are positioning this technology with growers in 2023. 

There are two selective spraying systems available today—John Deere’s and Greeneye Technology’s. 

NuWay-K&H Cooperative will be outfitting one of their Hagie sprayers with the Greeneye Technology system. Crissinger shares the co-op team made the decision to pursue offering selective spraying for the 2023 growing season in July 2022. 

“We had been paying attention to selective spraying from its early stages,” he says. “We were understanding that someday this was going to affect our business—we were going to go into some type of site specific methodology for weed control.”

While some have said this type of technology could be a threat to traditional ag retail, Crissinger says their team sees it as an opportunity. 

“Once we made the decision that this was the future of application, it was pretty much a no brainer to say we need to get involved with it right away on the on the front end so that we can help control the conversation and make sure that it gets brought to the marketplace properly,” he says. 

For 2023, the team will be focusing on offering selective spraying as a specialty application service and have a goal of covering 10,000 acres. 

“Our primary customers that we're going to be implementing first will be customers that have us already custom application for them,” he says. “We're going to use it pre planned incorporated applications, pre emerge applications and post emerge applications.”

Because it’s harder to predict product usage rates in the selective spraying tank, the team is looking to simplify that part of the program. 

“We've selected what product combinations we're going to use at each timing aspect and with each crop so that we can manage that peace of it. But with dual boom technology, you've still got a lot of flexibility,” he says.  “You can either layer residuals on it to keep weeds from coming up in the first place and then use the selective spraying system to kill any emerged weeds at that time. So in that case, you're relying completely on the selective spraying opportunity to control emerged weeds. Or you could use layered contact herbicide approach where you're doing a complete herbicide program through the broadcast line. And then adding more herbicide or pesticide power through the selective spraying like to layer contact herbicides to get better overall control or maybe kill a little larger weed if that's kind of what you're after. So we see three or four different ways that we're going to utilize this in the marketplace.”

Crissinger shares more about the approach NuWay-K&H takes to bring technologies to the field in The Scoop podcast: