Rich Bronec had a hunch smart spraying technology would fit perfectly in his production system, particularly across his fallow acres. He found the right technology in Europe and also avoided subscription fees.
Just south of the Canadian border, in Montana Big Sky country, former accountant Rich Bronec and his family farm winter wheat, lentils, chickpeas and rotationally graze black Angus cattle across 46,000 acres in a cropping region known as the “Golden Triangle” due to its pristine conditions for cereal grain production.
The crops are grown in a no-till system with about a third of his ground kept fallow every year so the soil can regenerate with moisture. It’s all dryland farming — there is no irrigation, so fallowing every season is also an insurance play to hedge against drought.
The farm’s cattle are all tracked via RFID ear tags, which Bronec says is just for a headcount. For the farm, it serves as a data collection point to track animal weights and other valuable information to manage the herd.
Working with Weed-It
Where Bronec is truly investing in cutting-edge technology is in his weed control program.This year, the farm bought and bolted a Weed-It Quadro spot spraying system onto one of its two Case IH 4440 Patriot sprayers.
The system, developed in The Netherlands by a tech startup spun out of Wageningen University, combines downward facing chlorophyll sensors and pulse width modulation nozzles to detect weeds from brown dirt (green on brown), applying tank mix only on the weeds. It’s especially useful across fallow acres, because there are no crops there to offer competition to the weeds.
In a traditional broadcast system, Bronec spent up to $33 per fallow acre on weed control products in a five-pass system. Now, with the Weed-It system only applying herbicide directly to the weeds, that metric is down to about $14 per acre. For his acreage alone, that’s a savings of $60,000 annually.
Weed-It does not charge on a per-acre basis or have annual subscription fees. The up-front cost is higher, but large farmers are able to use the technology across big acreage without incurring additional costs.
“What I think it brings to the table is now we can control tough weeds. We can tell a story that we’re using almost half of the chemicals on our acre,” Bronec says, noting the system has also saved on water costs and having to pay a driver to shuttle water back and forth.
“If you’re spraying 2,000 acres a day and you’re now at 90% less solution on those late summer passes, now I don’t need a water tender truck, and the guys don’t stop and refill as often,” Bronec says. The one potential downside is having to drive slower so the system can detect the weeds.
Learning Along the Way
For year two with his Weed-It, he plans to variable-rate fungicide on his chickpea crops. He can set it to apply a full rate of fungicide where the machine reads the canopy being the thickest and less where the canopy is airy enough to prevent infection. Chickpea plants in the Golden Triangle are susceptible to Ascochyta blight, he says.
“There’s a lot of room in this technology for improvement, and I’ve run the [John] Deere system, too. There are things I’ve liked about it, but I don’t think too many farmers are in love with the subscription model,” Bronec explains. “With this system we can spread the cost out across all of our acres.”
There’s also an opportunity to unlock more residual chemistries on his fallow acres. That will be useful in tackling the high pressure, resistant weeds that are more prevalent every year.
“It’s in its early stages, and we’re still kind of learning as we go,” Bronec says. “But the math says it’s going to pay, and then you get the bonus of the hidden things we discussed. I think there’s a stewardship component if we can farm a fallow acre using half the volume of product we did before. That’s a story our farm is proud of going forward.”
Original article: https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/big-savings-big-sky-montana-farmer-cuts-chem-spend-retrofit-smart-spray-