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One of the products from Precision Planting
that Arnold said intersects both environmental
sustainability and farmer profitability is
ReClaim
, a
boom recirculation product.
“Traditionally, farmers need to sit on the edge of the
field and spray the product on the ground for 30-plus
seconds [to] get the boom primed,” stated Arnold, “to
have the proper concentration of chemical across the
whole boom.”
He explained that the process of priming a traditional
sprayer boom is both wasteful and time-consuming,
and it is a process that is often inherently unsafe to
humans and the environment around them.
ReClaim helps to eliminate those issues by priming the
booms before a nozzle even opens.
“It means that your first droplets are effective, and
you can get back time, save product, and be a good
steward of the environment with your own sprayer,”
said Arnold.
The process works because ReClaim creates a path
from the sprayer boom back to the tank, allowing the
product to flow through the boom and back to the tank
to be mixed.
It prevents hot spots from forming on the boom and
prevents chemicals from settling out in the boom—and
it does all this without spraying a drop out of a nozzle.
Arnold said that ReClaim can be installed as an
upgrade on most of the sprayers owned by farmers
today—”just as our other products can be fitted onto
existing machinery of any brand as retrofit upgrades,”
he mentioned.
The ReClaim boom system is a product that is aimed
at small grain and row crop producers because of the
types of sprayers used—either self-propelled or pull-
type.
Due to the different spraying systems used in orchards
and vineyards, the ReClaim boom recirculation system
cannot be used.
Yes, ReClaim allows priming to be done before any
product is sprayed from a nozzle, which provides
product usage savings, and as noted by Arnold,
“ReClaim also allows for improved cleanout when an
operator switches products, reducing the chance of the
first pass of new product burning a susceptible crop.”
It’s easy to set up, said Arnold. When a Precision
Planting dealer adds ReClaim, they only have to
remove end caps from the nozzle bar sections, add
a fitting, and then attach the hoses to that fitting that
flow back to the tank.
Instead of the nozzle bar endcap being a dead end, it
makes it a continual path back to the tank.
“This is a true sense of what retrofitting or upgrading
a machine means,” noted Arnold. “The farmer keeps
the base machine but leverages Precision Planting
technology to provide a new capability that the
machine didn’t have before.
“The farmer doesn’t need a completely new machine
to get this new capability, thereby saving them money
and improving the function of the sprayer in this
instance.”
He added that they also use similar retrofit strategies
to upgrade other machine types, such as
SmartFirmer
for planters,
YieldSense
for combines, and
Clarity
for
seeders and dry fertilizer applicators.
Currently in development with Precision Planting is
its
Symphony Vision
targeted spraying technology
that can see a weed, identify the weed, and spray only
the areas of the field where weeds are growing—as
opposed to old-school techniques of having to spray
100 percent of a field to tackle weeds that may or may
not be there.
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“THE FARMER KEEPS THE BASE
MACHINE BUT LEVERAGES PRECISION
PLANTING TECHNOLOGY TO PROVIDE A
NEW CAPABILITY THAT THE MACHINE
DIDN’T HAVE BEFORE.”