Dammann sprayer hits the spot

A Bilberry green-on-green spot spraying system has been working on a Dammann sprayer in the UK and is providing a rapid return on investment by applying plant protection products only to areas of crop that require them. Arable Farming reports.

Dammann sprayer hits the spot

Dyson Farming became the first UK farming operation to buy a commercially available spot Bilberry’s green-on-green retrofittable cameras are placed along the length of the sprayer to scan the crop in front of the nozzles to identify weeds. If detected, the sprayer arrived in February 2020 with Bilberry’s spot spraying camera kit installed. The green-onbrown system had been well proven in other countries, so this was spraying system when in 2019 it invested in Bilberry’s weed-seeking cameras fitted to a new Dammann sprayer. In the first season of use a 95% hit rate of green-on-green applications was achieved.

The in-house farming team in

Lincolnshire had been challenged to reduce glyphosate and herbicide use across the business and increase accuracy of product applied.

By only applying plant protection products where they are needed, the Bilberry system has helped the farm save up to £20,000 per year, while also providing huge environmental advantages. system triggers the appropriate nozzle to provide a dose of product to the exact area that requires it.

Future-proofing

When assistant farm manager Dave Parker came to replace a self-propelled sprayer, he researched how a spot spraying arrangement could help and which sprayers could be fitted with the system at factory build stage. “We wanted our next sprayer to provide us with the opportunity to reduce overall spend on plant protection products when we did not require blanket coverage. From an environmental point of view, spraying products to plants that do not need them is a waste of valuable resources,” he says. “I knew there was a spot spraying system on the market as I had seen it in use in Australia. Green-on-green was in its infancy when we bought the machine, especially in the UK, so Bilberry asked us if we’d like to be involved with future-proofing the cameras.” The sprayer is based at Nocton, west Lincolnshire, with the farm previously using three Agrifac self-propelled sprayers to cover 5,000 hectares of cropping, including everything from cereals and oilseed rape through to vining peas, maize, and sugar beet. The Dammann DT2800S simple to get the set up and working on UK fields, as Mr Parker explains. “We have been using green-onbrown since the sprayer arrived, which has provided us with some big reductions in glyphosate usage. Some of the best results we have had when using this has been spraying ploughed land after vining peas, which has reduced glyphosate spend by 70%, or more in some cases. “There has also been a saving when spraying off fields with a lot of weed coverage. The system could be switched on for 95% of the time, but there is still a 5% saving compared to before and over a large area it soon adds up. We do not want to waste these expensive products but

Switching between nozzles is automatic and depends on forward speed. put them in the intended place.” The pandemic meant it was a few months before the system was fully operational and a lot of the early support from Bilberry and Dammann was provided remotely by technicians in France and Germany respectively. “Dammann helped us through the ordering process and we put a lot of trust in what they were saying and the backup they could provide with such an untried system in the UK.

“The technicians there wanted a lot of input into how the Bilberry system would suit UK conditions and communicate with the sprayer. We try to always spray with one nozzle at a time, but Dammann wanted the option to activate three or five nozzles at once to ensure the weeds or disease would be in the centre of the sprayed area when travelling on rough ground.

“Bilberry remote back up works well. We cannot fault them; they are always on the phone or able to answer a message any time of the day. It was a risk to be the first to run the technology and you need good back up to make it work.”

The farm used the spot spraying system on every field of wheat and barley in spring and Mr Parker estimates a big financial and environmental saving.

“This year we sprayed all the winter wheat and spring barley at our Nocton and Carrington farms with the Dammann and Bilberry combination, which totalled around 5,000ha of crops. I realistically see a saving of £20,000 in herbicide products alone compared with a blanket spray,” says Mr Parker.

“Getting it to work successfully across these farms, we could easily pay for the system in two years. I can also see this technology will be essential for some products in the future as it is putting the plant protection products in the right place. This will be the future of chemical application.

“We are now managing the fields on an almost individual plant basis

Twelve RGB cameras are fitted along the boom of the Dammann sprayer. How does the system work?

rBilberry’s green-on-green camera system uses artificial intelligence algorithms to identify the crop and the weeds from the 12 RGB cameras across its width. The cameras take 16 images per second in real time, which are all fed into an artificial intelligence computer module.

The highly sophisticated camera system can work on wheat, barley and grassland with the operator changing the sensitivity of the cameras to spot weeds of a certain size.

The cameras must learn to identify different crop growth stages, including colour variations, shadowing in different weather conditions.

All are big factors when getting the cameras to spot and spray every weed.

as the technology allows us to treat the crops in this way. There are benefits to increased output, too, as a full 7,000-litre load would cover 70ha before but could now allow up to 100ha as the product is only being applied where it is needed.”

The farm used to spray herbicide and fungicide together, but there is now an extra pass required to apply the fungicide separately. However, despite this additional application, the reduction in herbicide use is more than worth the extra pass.

Savings

“The savings from having the cameras and the accuracy they operate and hit the target far outweigh the extra trip though the crop,” says Mr Parker.

Ed Ford, technical agronomist at Dyson Farming, says the introduction of the sprayer has allowed for more targeted and efficient use of plant protection products and there is huge potential for this to be linked with mapping technology.

“Currently we must assess what fields we are planning to spray with the system and take an educated guess to the weed coverage. This will give the operator an idea of how much product will be required and avoid having mixed-up product left in the tank. We may have to apply a full dose on the final field with one product to ensure we are empty at the end,” he says.

“It is a bit basic in its current form, but there is huge scope for this to improve in the future. I can see data and imagery from drones potentially being fed into the sprayer as well as direct injection. This may allow a split tank set-up with herbicide and fungicide being applied on the same pass by the camera system.”

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