CultiWise reduces input costs and avoids unnecessary herbicide application in unaffected areas.
A dry summer reduces grass growth, making docks more prominent in the sward. With their deeper taproots, docks continued to grow despite the dry conditions, creating a weed control challenge for the farmer.
Conventional herbicide application would have treated the whole field, including the areas without docks.This would require more herbicide and put additional stress and reduce yield of the grass.
Tallis Amos used drone imagery and CultiWise software to identify docks across an 11.65 ha grassland field at a dairy farm in Herefordshire.
The field was flown by drone on 14th August. Then CultiWise software processed the imagery. CultiWise plant AI technology identified individual dock plants in the field and created a map of each individual dock plant. This information was then used to create a prescription map.
The prescription maps were transferred to the John Deere operation centre and loaded into the contractor’s Mazzotti 4080 sprayer. This sprayer was equipped with a 36m boom and individual nozzles spaced at 0.5m. The sprayer applied herbicide only in the prescription area where the docks were.
The field was sprayed 7th September.
The sprayer used 87% less herbicide, saving £609 in herbicide costs.
By targeting individual dock plants, the farmers applied herbicide to just 1.5 ha of the 11.65 ha field, leaving the remaining 10.15 ha untreated. A conventional blanket application across the whole field would have cost £699 at £60/ha. By treating only dock-infested areas, the farmers reduced the application cost from £699 for a blanket application to just £90.
This demonstrated the financial and environmental benefits of combining drone imagery with CultiWise software to create prescriptions that target individual weeds instead of the whole crop.
CultiWise reduced input costs and avoided unnecessary herbicide application in unaffected areas.
Figure One: Prescription Map Created in CultiWise
Figure Two: As-applied map from John Deere Operation Centre post-application
Figure 3: Nozzles turning on and off on the sprayer while spraying the prescription map which was created in CultiWise.
Figure 4: Results: docks dying off 2 weeks after application
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