Greg Millard of Vernon Valley Farms is a Precision Planting dealer. He says there are big things on the horizon for Precision, so stand by. Tinkess Photo
OTTAWA – Greg Millard of Vernon Valley Farms was one of the 360 exhibitors at this year’s Ottawa Valley Seed Growers Association (OVSGA) Farm Show and seemed to be getting a lot of interest in Precision Planting and variable rate sprayers. Millard took a few minutes to explain an idea that while it seemed quite simple, could save a reasonable amount of money by being more efficient and effective.
“So, what we’re doing with these, is these nozzles are individually controlled. As we go through the field, these cameras are watching for weeds. Through AI technology, they’ve been able to distinguish this is what a corn plant looks like. They’ve got 1.2 million pictures of a corn plant, so it knows what a corn plant will take. Anything else that doesn’t work within that parameter is probably a weed.
“So, we’ll actually start to measure the height of the weed and the density of that patch, and we’ll do some variable rate spraying that that side of the boom could be into a four-to-five-inch weed, with a density of 90% we’ll dump more herbicides on one side versus the other side. Variable rate spraying is what we’re doing.
So, you’re only using what you need, where you need it. Millard says this might not appeal to some operators, but there is a significant number who could benefit from it.
Some of the custom operators probably wouldn’t be interested because they don’t know the first year what amount of herbicide they might need, and they don’t want to end up with 75 gallons left in the tank.
“The farmers that we’ve got a relationship with, because we’ve working on their planters, we know those guys, they’ll take that extra time to save, to go run for that extra herbicide, or have to have a tank on board to put that extra chemistry in,” adds Millard. “But as we start to build that database up, we know that weed patch is there for next year. Right now, we start to know how much chemistry we’ve got to go into that field with, the next year, then we can start to monitor that patch and see what’s happening to that weed patch. This allows it to get more and more efficient.”
Millard says there’s other things coming down the road from Precision on injection, chemical injection that you start to put just water in the tank and inject it in the stream at the nozzle, but stay tuned on that, because it’s still a little ways off. “That’s what we’re kind of doing,” said Millard. “We’re apparently the only company in the world that is doing variable rate spraying, so stay tuned, very neat to see where we go with this.”
When we first introduced the planter technology, Millard says that a lot of the big multinational companies quashed it, saying that you don’t need this. “Now they either buy the stuff from us and put it on their planters, or they’re copycats. We’ve been here before, that’s where I like to start.”
Vernon Valley Farms is located at 4479 Pioneer Road in Vernon, Ontario. You can reach them at 613 774-6400.
