How much horsepower do I need?

How much horsepower (HP) do you need (really) when pairing a tractor and a towed sprayer or any other PTO powered implement? This important question should be asked BEFORE purchasing any towed implement. Surprisingly, there’s not much guidance out there, so you might hear answers like: Whatever my tractor has must be enough… whatever that […]

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Optical Spot Spraying and AI Scouting

Site-specific treatments have long been a goal in agriculture. It makes sense to provide inputs or treatments at rates that reflect the local situation. And to a large degree, those capabilities have been available for fertility and seed inputs for some time, with input zones reflecting soil types or topography. But the sprayer world has […]

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Fundamentals of Spray Drift

The year 1989 marked my first spray drift trial under the watchful eye of Dr. Raj Grover and John Maybank. We evaluated the performance of several spray shrouds, Flexi-Coil, AgShield, Brandt, and Rogers, and wanted to measure just how effective they were. But in my heart I wasn’t interested in drift. I wanted to study […]

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John Deere See & Spray Select

On March 2, 2021, John Deere entered the optical spot spray (OSS) market with its first product, See & Spray Select™. This “Green on Brown” system identifies green material on a non-green background and is thus suited for pre-seed burnoff, chem fallow, or post harvest. It is competing for the same market space as Cropland’s […]

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Tortured Numbers: Basic Statistics for Growers

In North America, winter is agriculture conference and lecture season. Growers are inundated with graphs and charts and left to make sense of what they’re seeing. It might be an agrichemical rep promoting a new pesticide or a seed dealer comparing yields. Maybe an equipment dealer is illustrating return on investment. Even university researchers and government extension […]

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