Some of the latest developments presented at the John Deere Sustainability Days in Oschersleben were weed mapping drones and a GPS-enabled sprayer with intelligent boom section shutoff (SectionControl) and fertilizer nozzle control (ExactApply).
This solution saves you money on pesticides and allows you to apply them only where they are needed, not all over the field.
The drone’s job is to scan the fields and map the weeds. To do this, John Deere selected Delair UX11 Ag drones with software that can identify weed plants in corn fields. All information from drones with exact coordinates of weed plants is transmitted to the John Deere Operations Center, where the company’s developments create an interactive map of weeds with their exact, up to 1 cm, location.
The tractor and sprayer are then synchronized with the Operations Center, so the sprayer applies weed control pesticide only in the right areas where it is necessary.
Using this system will certainly reduce pesticide use.
Is the Delair UX11 Ag reliable, will it always detect weeds, weed count and calculate the right dose?
John Deere experts say it will. The drone system is only used to scan fields. If a farmer doubts or just doesn’t want to use drones, or the area where the field is located prohibits the use of drones, the farmer can make such a map based on satellite photos and his own knowledge.
John Deere also said that some progress has been made in developing the AutoPath navigation system.
According to John Deere, manure application is experiencing its own “renaissance” in Europe because of skyrocketing mineral fertilizer prices. But slurry also needs to be used wisely. John Deere experts conclude that it is now even more important to spread slurry precisely and with less wastage. The application of this fertilizer shows how the AutoPath system works at the moment.
According to the Americans, strip-till is a particularly effective and low-emission method of natural manure application. This method should be applied immediately before seeding. The manure is applied in strips about 10-12 cm deep into the soil. Application can be done directly on untreated oil, such as after harvesting whole-plant silage. Then we save on additional trips.
During the first slurry pass, guide lines are created for each field and stored in the Control Center. These lines are then used to automatically create guide lines for all other passes in the field, such as spraying, fertilizing or harvesting later in the year. With this solution, operators know which lines to start with and how to proceed.
After fertilizing, the corn is sown with a planter, which places the grains exactly in the manure belts because AutoPath knows where the fertilizer has been applied. The grains are placed about 7 cm above the slurry.