Driving Technology

Battle Against Resistant Weeds: How One Technology Could Revive No-Till On the Plains

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 14:30:42 GMT

Farming in southwest Kansas isn’t for the faint of heart. Producing a crop in an arid climate can be a challenge, but this year, Luke Jaeger is thankful for some much needed rain.

“It was the wettest November on record for us in some areas of the farm, which is crazy this time of year.” says Jaeger, a farmer in Minneola, Kan.

For an area that typically receives less than 20" of rain each year, Jaeger says some of his farms have seen 6" of rain during the month of November alone.

The deluge of rain is much needed moisture the winter wheat is soaking up, and it’s also planting ideas for different crop plans next spring.

“I was just talking with our local dealer here about how on our farm, for the first time ever, we will probably plant more dryland corn than we will grain sorghum, because of the subsoil moisture we have in the ground.

Jaeger and his brother farm a mix of corn, sorghum, soybeans and wheat, most of which is dryland, across 20,000 acres.

“Every year, my brother and I, Matthew, take a 30,000' approach and poke holes in our operation to find where we are spending too much money and where can we save,” Jaeger says.

A never ending journey to solve problems on their own farm, they started EGE Products to manufacture specialty ag chemicals and fertilizers.

“I like to say our farm is a 20,000 acre research farm,” Jaeger says. “In our office, we have a full-scale laboratory with formulation chemists, Ph.D.s, chemists and chemical engineers. So, we see problems on the farm and bring them back to our formulations team to work on solutions.”

With the farm to then put those products to the test, Jaeger says it’s a constant journey to innovate.

“I think it’s important to be relevant in the marketplace and always be innovating, whether it’s on the farm or with EGE. We’re always trying to innovate,” Jaeger says. “I think if you’re not innovating, you’re dying. A lot of people bristle at adopting newer technologies and we just dive right into it and go.”

One of the latest products they decided to try wasn’t something they produced on their own. Instead, it was added to their sprayer: John Deere’s See & Spray.

“It’s like that technology was built for our farm,” Jaeger says. “We didn’t approach See & Spray technology to specifically reduce costs. A lot of it was reducing the toxicity of some of the chemicals that we were using on the farm.”

Able to Use More Effective, But More Expensive Herbicides

Jaeger says they run their sprayer 11 months out of the year, and he’s the one who’s typically in the driver’s seat.

“I put about 600 hours a year in the seat of one of our sprayers, and I don’t like Paraquat,” he explains. “What See & Spray has allowed us to do is chemistries that perform the same, but they were a little too expensive, it has allowed us to integrate that chemistry more into our operation.”

Jaeger says in his area, a chemistry like Paraquat is widely used out of necessity, mainly because it’s the most affordable and best option available for farmers

However, they Jaegers don’t like to use that particular herbicide, saying it drifts too much and is too toxic. Now, thanks to the new spraying technology that allows them to only spray where weeds are present, their farm has been able to make the switch.

“It’s allowed us to move to other chemistries that were more expensive and hard to justify when you were spraying every acre. And now we’ve been able able to move to to some of those less toxic. I mean, the chemistry that we use now is less toxic than table salt. So, I mean, you can get real excited about that,” said Jaeger.

The Battle Against Resistant Weeds

Instead of looking at the technology to save on costs, Jaeger sees it as a way to do a more effective job.

“I found that we’re going out earlier, more often than we normally would,” he adds. “If you’re going to blanket spray, you want to wait until there are enough weeds out there to justify the the application. And for us, we didn’t. We don’t have to wait because we know maybe we’re only going to spray 5% of the field.”

Because of their location, the Jaegers had to transition to nearly 100% no-till, a necessity to control wind erosion and help preserve and protect any moisture in the soil.

“A lot of farmers have had to abandon no till because it’s just too expensive, and it became harder and harder to control those resistant weeds,” Jaeger says. “But with this technology, I think we’re going to see more farmers coming back into no till because they can cost effectively control those weeds.

In 2011, it was kochia that Roundup herbicide would no longer control. Now Jaeger says Pigweed and resistant grasses, like switchgrass, have become a yearly battle.

“What this See & Spray technology allows us to do is run a more concentrated spray mixture, a high rate of glyphosate or cluster them. But we’re only spraying that particular weed and not the whole field. So, we can run a higher rate of that chemical, get way better control, and our costs are still very minimal because we’re only spraying that target weed that’s out there,” he explained.

When farming smarter and always trying to innovate, the Jaegers say it’s technology like See & Spray that seems to have a perfect fit here in southwest Kansas.

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How This One Technology Helped a Michigan Farmer Cut His Herbicide Use by 60%

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 22:24:15 GMT

Settled just south of Holland, Mich., it’s always busy on Scenic View Dairy. This time of year, with 2,000 head of cows being milked and a couple thousand acres of crops in the field, it’s bustling more than ever.

“The crops look pretty good this year,” says Brian Geerlings, a partner in Scenic View Dairy. “We got off to a little bit of a slow start with a cooler spring, but we’ve got some heat right now that’s really making crops turn around, and they’re looking good.”

Geerlings says while weather is a challenge year-to-year on the farm, his other biggest challenges as a dairy producer are milk prices and finding enough labor.

“Labor has been a challenge, obviously. It seemed like after the Covid pandemic, we couldn’t get people to work quite as well,” says Geerlings. “The pricing [of milk] has been a challenge. There’s been ups and downs. It’s not a lot of fun when we can’t pay our bills. And that weighs heavy on us when we can’t. So, pricing matters a lot in those situations.”

The reality for dairy producers is milk prices had been below the cost of production for consecutive years. Geerlings says lately prices have turned around, so the dairy side of the business is a little more optimistic.

That’s good news for Scenic View Dairy, because the partners are serious about milking cows and pumping close to 40 million pounds a day. But Geerlings says the operation is much more than a dairy farm. The producers are progressive, proactive and always on the hunt for the best technologies.

“We’ve done several things in the last 20 years,” he says. We’ve put in anaerobic digesters, drones for spraying fields and now this new See & Spray technology with John Deere, that I think have been very valuable. There are other technologies we’ve looked at and passed on either because they didn’t seem to be a good fit for our farm, or they didn’t provide good ROI or a payback.”

Geerlings says they definitely don’t shy away from technology. From turning methane gas into natural gas and putting it in a pipeline, to finding new ways to spray crops, the partners are always looking for ways to become more efficient and are often early adopters of technology.

One of the recent additions to the farm was a sprayer. Instead of buying a new sprayer, the dairy opted for a used sprayer, but added a precision upgrade kit with See & Spray .

“We’re working with some weeds that are herbicide resistant. It’s really no secret that those are out there, and we have a couple that are a problem for us,” he says. “But we really wanted to be able to control costs. The weed isn’t widespread, it’s in certain areas or spots in the field. So to broadcast-spray the entire field would have been very costly.”

He says weed-control programs can cost anywhere from $20 to $30 per acre, but by being able to see and spray only the weeds actually present in a field, the technology is producing a savings even bigger than he imagined would be possible.

“I have a couple of fields that I was spraying last week, and I think we saw 26% of an area applied in one field. And then in another field we sprayed around 43% of it. So, there are fields with the higher weed pressure and some with lower. But in either case, the benefits add up quick.”

He says he’s cut his herbicide use by 60% in some fields, and even more in others.

“We were going to be happy if it was a 50% reduction,” Geerlings says. “We’re pretty much exceeding what we were hoping for, which obviously makes the technology pay even more. It’s really working well for us.”

That herbicide cost savings even caught their local retailer by surprise.

“He showed us some maps and he was at 34% in this one field of applying product. So, he’s saving a significant amount,” says Josh Rabbers, ag sales manager at GreenMark Equipment in Michigan. “I think this is a big game changer for what we’re going to see in the future just to have chemical savings and benefits in just spraying those certain problem spots in the field.”

Geerlings says watching the sprayer work in the field has been impressive.

“It’s amazing that the cameras that are on the booms are seeing weeds that I can’t see as an operator,” he says. “These machines are so wide; nowadays, they are 120-feet wide. From the seat, you have to be able to see 60 feet each direction. And to be able to see weeds that are an inch tall or less at times, you can’t possibly do a good job of spot spraying.”

What he’s been really impressed with is watching the nozzles fire on and off as the camera sees and sprays a weed. And that’s exactly how the technology works. Each camera serves as a set of eyes, finding weeds so small that not even Geerlings or the farm’s sprayer operator can see them.

“It has cameras along the boom, and it’s looking ahead of it and seeing the weed that’s there. It’s spraying product on just the weed there,” Rabbers says.

For a dairy that sits close to Lake Michigan, the savings isn’t just about dollars. Less herbicide use means applications are more environmentally friendly than ever.

“My dad always said farmers were the first environmentalists. So, it really fits with our philosophy of trying to not use more product than we absolutely have to,” Geerlings adds.

Geerlings is seeing solid savings result in dollars and environmental costs, and in the process uncovering even more opportunities on the farm, making Scenic View Dairy truly leading-edge.