The world stands on the threshold of a new crisis. Ukrainian agricultural producers already felt a significant drop in profitability last year. Forecasts for this year are also disappointing. And some analysts even claim the era of high profits is over altogether.
An era of carefully reviewing resource use to boost the economic efficiency of every hectare is now beginning.
Pesticides are a huge cost item in the production of any crop. To this day we apply pesticides across the whole field with boom sprayers. We can vary the dose (spraying less in one part of the field, more in others), but it’s still treatment of the entire field.
The BERTHOUD plant is a world-renowned, narrowly specialized manufacturer of crop-protection equipment with a 125-year history. To its credit are numerous innovative solutions, most of which are the manufacturer’s own intellectual property, patented.
Over the last two years the plant has been working on a complete overhaul of spraying technology. The task set was to make it possible to apply the product on a spot basis, that is, not across the whole field, but only on the problem (on the weed, disease or pest). To do this, solutions are needed to identify the problem and trigger application at the right spots.
It’s safe to say the search for a solution was a success. The first step has been taken toward fighting weeds. BERTHOUD combined its efforts with two leading IT companies, Bilberry and Carbon Bee AgTech, which also own huge global weed databases.
The result of this collaboration was the innovative intelligent spot-spraying system BERTHOUD SPOT SPRAYING, which cuts herbicide use by 50 to 90%!
Cameras are installed on the sprayer boom at 3-meter intervals, and the images from them are fed into a special program. Thanks to the use of artificial-intelligence technology with machine-learning elements, the system analyzes objects in frame (in particular, color and shape), and can also process complex images, for example under conditions of dynamic shadows, part of a plant appearing in frame, and so on – allowing it to identify weeds among cultivated plants. An integral part of this is a large database of weeds and cultivated plants – objects with a set of specific characteristics – which is constantly updated. The program analyzes the current image against this database. The technology’s “brains” are connected to the sprayer’s onboard computer. As soon as a weed is detected, the system activates the nozzle or several nozzles above it, simultaneously building a map of weed distribution. All of this works even at speeds of up to 25 km/h.
The current version of the Berthoud-Bilberry-Carbon Bee AgTech system has been “road-tested” on three sprayers – one in France and two in Bulgaria. This solution is expected to become available in Ukraine very soon. Meanwhile, active work continues: developers now face a harder task – spot application of fungicides.
Denys Mushtyn,
Tel.: (095) 274 94 92
Email: d.mushtyn@astra-group.com.ua
