The first spot-spraying “green-on-brown” sprayers were rolling into test plots 30 years ago, in the mid-1990s. So why isn’t every Midwestern cornfield crawling with self-driving sprayers today, spritzing minute amounts of finely calibrated herbicide mixes onto individual weeds?
Research and development of target spray technology has raced miles ahead of the realities in the field. In some cases, companies and start-ups are developing second- and third-generation target and robotic spray technology -- before their first-generation technology has reached widescale farmer adoption.
That gap between cutting edge research and actual farmer adoption was the source of frustration and discussion at a recent symposium devoted to targeted and autonomous technology.
“My opinion on this is that we largely don’t need a lot more research on some of these things – I think there are some spectacular technologies; we just need to get them out to the field,” said Chris Padwick, a technical fellow at Blue River Technology.
As for the source of the bottleneck, fingers pointed in many directions, but most landed on two of the usual suspects -- regulation -- the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide labels still haven’t even accounted for application by drone – another decades-old technology -- and economic hurdles -- few farmers can afford the new sprayers upfront because their large price tags reflect years of expensive research and development that companies are eager to recoup, amid tight farming profit margins.
Make precision sprayers pay
Economics – and the recent downward turn in the farm economy – is definitely at play.
John Deere and Blue River’s development of See & Spray technology is moving forward briskly. Padwick promised symposium attendees that night-spraying capabilities were right around the corner, as well as several new crop systems, and fully autonomous farming systems in corn and soybeans by 2030.
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