Scott Carrigan, a dry land farmer from Moree, NSW, has used John Deere's See & Spray technology since 2019 to cut chemical use and target weeds more precisely. He explains the economic and ecological benefits of the system.
So we, we purchased a John Deere spray in 2019 and shortly afterwards were approached by John Deere to see if we'd be happy to work with him on the sea and spray. Scott Carrigan is my name. We're dry land farmers and graziers from Moree, which is northwest New South Wales. So we've just used sea and spray for pretty much all our summer fallow spraying. We were probably averaging 10% area applied. So, you know, a 90% chemical saving is a fantastic result. What that means for our business is that the obvious benefits of having less chemical to purchase, massive saving there, as well as that you've got the benefit of having to handle less chemical and less chemical being applied to our country. All those things have got major, not only economical benefits, but ecological benefits as well. And we just like that. We've got one machine to do all spraying. We can broadcast spray with it and then at the click of a button we've got a spot sprayer. Increasingly, some of our weeds are getting harder and harder to kill. The camera technology gives us the ability to target the weeds and hit them harder and not pour unnecessary chemical on the bare ground. It's technology that we've been looking forward to for quite a while and anything that involves less use and less dependence on chemical has got to be a good thing.
