Alexander Stevens and Millie Bates test John Deere's ExactShot planter at Kulunga Farm in Queensland. The technology delivers starter fertiliser precisely at seed release, improving emergence uniformity and plant vigor. Early results show potential for fertiliser savings and better returns, though growers are still evaluating it across different soils.
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It's definitely going to be essential for us. We have struggled in the past to get that pop out. By using this planter, we can really certainly target areas, target the seedling, and really control where we put the fertiliser. We certainly know what the yield potential is, but trying to make it more cost-effective or lower the cost to get that same similar yield certainly makes it very attractive. My name is Alexander Stevens. I work for the Gay Partnership here in Dalby, Queensland. I am one of their cropping managers. Grow cotton, dryland and irrigation, and we do have a crop rotation with sorghum, corn, and mung beans in the summer, and wheat, barley, and chickpeas in the winter periods.
Hey, I'm Millie Bates. I'm an agronomist at Elders in Dalby, and yeah, we're out here today at McVays on Kulunga Farm looking at the John Deere ExactShot. The trial began last year when we had the ExactRate planter out here and were able to utilise that to do some trials with starter fertiliser only and just see what it could do. And then yeah, this year we've been able to have a look at the ExactShot. Plant us, so I guess the idea grew from there, just talking about it with Xander and what his thoughts were on the technology and what it could do and just see what we can look at.
Here we've got a John Deere 1725C ExactEmerge equipped with ExactShot. Been very fortunate to have the opportunity to run this planter for this cropping season.
We're so excited to see what can we achieve, what can actually happen, and it opens up a new, I guess, frontier where we can possibly take a more expensive product and actually apply it to the seed, give potential savings, and see if we can't actually get a much better plant vigour or plant establishment across the whole field.
Probably the most important part of the machine, we've got the seed bowl. SeedBrush grabs the seed from the seed bowl, takes it down, all the way down, right down into the seed trench, and gets pushed out right down here at the end of the seed tube. Inside the seed brush, there's a sensor where it's, as it's going past the sensor, machine works out when the seed gets released and it gives it a nice little shot of fertiliser. So, Millie, we've got 606 planted here. Probably a bit down on our seeds a metre, but we still probably got around that 10 to 12 seeds a metre, which looks pretty good. And it seemed to really give us a pretty good kick out of the ground, which is what we've been aiming for.
Yeah, it's a really difficult year this year with sucking insects in cotton. These fields have been sprayed for ruther Glen bugs and thrips, all got thrown in together. So yeah, has been a difficult season to get the cotton to get going. On top of that, we've had weather conditions that really haven't been conducive to getting cotton out of the ground, but a few of the plants you can see are all blown over, but I think anything that you can do to get cotton up and going is going to definitely be a big help for us going forward to try and get that extra bit of yield on top of sort of the averages we're doing at the moment.
Where this technology has come from is that through all of Australia here, particularly the northern regions where we grow row crops in the summer and we need fertiliser to get that crop out of the ground and to get its best yield potential, potential. And so we are driven at John Deere to try and enable our customers and our growers to actually control their parameters, get a better outcome, and actually get better application and a better result overall.
It's unreal, the technology that we've got coming through, and, um, seeing the opportunities that we have with that and thinking about all the different things that you can potentially do, I think is just Yeah, a pretty unreal thing. I think the big picture is just return on investment for the grower is number one for me as an agro. You've got the sustainability piece, I guess. We've got a lot more pressure with disease and different things that are coming in now that we need to continue to look at and get better at. We've got a lot of new stuff coming to market with the likes of micronutrients, biologicals, all that style of product that probably isn't necessarily cost-effective in a broadacre scene, but may have a fit, but we don't know because it hasn't been done.
It's like we're sort of just at the cusp of like discovering where it actually best suits us. Yes, it's a tandy for fertiliser savings. That is sort of just the entry point for us, but like give it a few more years, we'll probably have a better idea where this type of tool to enhance our crop emergence, I should say. The thing that I like about it is just that consistency of the seed placement. And spacing. Also with the added feature of the ExactShot, we can now really, you know, fine-tune, get fertilisers that will be beneficial for the seedlings at that particular age when we're applying that fertiliser.
Talking to other growers about the technology, even just seeing it myself, you talk to other growers and you go, oh hey, I've seen this new planter that's working, it's worth a look at. People sort of start talking about it, you get it out in the farming community that way pretty easy. So yeah, I think it's definitely interesting technology, but it'll be that return on investment piece. If you can prove that it is giving you that, then yeah, I think you got a good shot.
Always trying to, you know, get that high, high yield is a big thing for us, but if we can just increase our average overall yields, some of our variating soils is, you know, is where we'll probably see the most benefit from this technology.
