HANOVER, Ger. — Farmers are being pushed to find an alternative to desiccants to burn down crops, as companies are increasingly leery of herbicides approved close to harvest.
People have been shocking weeds with electricity for 100 years, but the return on the electricity invested and the technology required to do so safely haven’t always worked.
Crop.zone is a German company developing commercial field-size weed shocking implements, especially to desiccate growing crops before they are harvested and to kill cover crops or hay fields. Crop.zone uses a liquid applied just before the crop is shocked in order to increase the efficacy of the process. The company has been testing that unit in the Outlook, Sask. area this summer.
Now the company has created an implement that can fit on a standard sprayer. The sprayer provides the liquid and the boom unit will fit between the rows, giving the unit the potential to control weeds during crop growth. Crop.zone partnered with John Deere to build the new unit and together they were one of the winners of the top concept award at Agritechnica.
The biggest equipment at Agritechnica is for potatoes and sugar beets. It shows how much money is invested in harvesting and processing some types of vegetables. There’s a whole building full of potato equipment at Agritechnica and it’s impressive the technological innovation that’s gone into managing the steps it takes to get vegetables to the market.
Automation and artificial intelligence solutions are showing up in many places in agriculture, and the products are maturing and closer to market. Naio is a French creator of autonomy solutions for horticulture and high value crops. They have a distributor in Canada and are working to create more dealers across North America. They recently announced that, as long as certain operating criteria are met, that Naio will take on the liability of the autonomous operation of their robots on a customer farm. That’s a big leap to assuage one of the major farmer and insurer concerns about automation.
They told me at Agritechnica that the Augmented Autonomy program will be available around the world.
As well, they sure take their Farming Simulator seriously in Europe.
