Jake and Felicity Hamilton farm dry land crops on Australia's Darling Downs and use John Deere's See & Spray Select to cut chemical use while keeping yields up. The technology spots weeds and sprays only what needs it, reducing waste and adapting their farm to changing climate conditions.
We are trying to develop our methods to adapt to the changing climate. I mean, we're getting more intense rainfall that seems to be further and further in between. So our farming methods have had to adapt over the years. My name's Jake Hamilton.
And I'm Felicity Hamilton and we are on a 5,000 hectares dry land cropping farm west of Condamine in the Darling Downs.
My family's been farming in this area since 1937 and we've expanded our operation in 1980 and 2017 to be the size that we are now. We grow predominantly winter crops and we have a wide range of John Deere equipment that we use, from tractors to harvesters and sprayers. Of course, we've had this 616R with the sand Spray select since roughly May last year, and we've put it to good use ever since.
The best thing about the CN Spray select is that it has reduced our chemical, which has also reduced our chemical costs.
The CN Spray select has increased our productivity purely just because it's not spraying all the time, we're not filling the tank all the time. That way we can just load it up in the morning, the operator can jump on and generally go spraying for the whole day with one tank. And it's just that easy. About a year ago you said, I'm never spraying.
I have flat out refused to learn and here I am.
It's a very comfy machine to operate too, just by the way it even.
Has a massage chair.
We've always been chasing efficiency gains to make our business more excellent economically and environmentally sustainable. And we've made incremental improvements over the years with Deere's other products like Autotrac for pass, to pass, overlap control, section control with our older sprayers to save on chemical. And they've all just been small gains, whereas sand spray is just a huge leap ahead. It depends on your application, but we're seeing savings from 70 anywhere up to 95% for the last decade. We've had a pretty strict regime of using residual herbicides over summer to try and keep our weed burden down. But even with that, you're always going to get escapes. And that's where the Sand Spray select really fits in, because we can go out and we can just hit any of those escapes without having to spray the whole paddock when we're fallow spraying with the Sand Spray select now we just leave the cameras on all the time. So even if we are only saving 5 to 10%, that's still a saving that most businesses would take happily any day. We have a legal responsibility to document what we're putting out with a sprayer.
We are documenting the weather, the products.
That we're using and the rates that they're going at it. The technology in the Greenstar displays in this cab make that so easy for us. It all comes down to simplicity, efficiency, just ease of use that folds up in 30 seconds and transport speed. I don't know many tow behinds that you can pull at 55 kilometres an hour, so changing between paddocks is a breeze. And that's really made our spraying a lot more efficient. Technological advancements like the sand spray select have been hugely beneficial to our business. It makes us more environmentally and economically sustainable and that's something we need to keep building on into the future.
