PHOTOS: PETER ROEK
PLANT DETECTION ▶▶▶
Minimising chemicals and labour with camera-controlled hoe
W BY RENÉ KOERHUIS
hen Sjaak Huetink was offered the opportunity by his contrac- tor Goossens Flevoplant to try out the Poulsen Robovator
camera-controlled inter-row hoeing machine on his strawberry plants, he did not need to be asked twice. “The machine became available temporarily because the crop rows on other contracted plots were already too closed up to still hoe in between rows in early June. On our plots, the plants are spaced 30 centimetres apart rather than 20, making it the ideal spac- ing for using this machine. It enabled us to re- duce the amount of crop protection products we use and the number of labour hours spent weeding even further.”
Both within and between rows The three-row machine hoes both within and between the rows of strawberry plants, which are spaced 1.5 metres apart. This distance is used for runners to grow towards one another in order to root between the rows of parent plants. At various times, fifteen workers on a flat-bed weeder remove the flowers using a knife and pulling up the weeds that the hoes leave or cannot reach. The runners are spread out by the same workers later on. Ultimately, the parent plants are removed using a rotary
Dutch bulb grower Sjaak Huetink is a keen enthusiast of using the Poulsen Robovator camera-controlled hoeing machine. He tested it in his strawberries transplants. “We have never sprayed so little, spent so little time weeding, and never have we had so little weed infestations.”
cultivator and the young plants are lifted. Hue- tink grows 30 hectares of strawberry plants in total for propagation for Goossens Flevoplant.
Constantly refining the settings After making the necessary adjustments and using a lower travel speed in particular, worker Marcel Smid soon got the hang of the hoeing. “There are few things that make me happier than being sent out with a hoeing machine! The normal one is great, but I love this cam- era-controlled one.” He can therefore provide a faultless explanation of how the machine works. “The machine is powered by the PTO shaft, which means it has its own hydraulics and power supply. It needs that electricity for the computer that analyses the images from the three cameras. Each camera has its own light source, which creates a consistently lit en- vironment regardless of whether you are work- ing in cloudy or sunny conditions. Even so, I in- put the amount of sunlight, the size of the plants and the spacing between the plants in
the terminal. This information and the images captured by the cameras are used to move the two hydraulically powered hoes in and out of each row. The ‘bike wheel’ at the back ensures the machine stays level using the hydraulic spacer and also allows us to measure the travel speed reliably. The machine also has a sizeable hydraulic side shift to enable it to follow the rows using the camera images.”
Adjustments Once Goossens Flevoplant had delivered the machine and hoed the first few passes for demonstration purposes, Marcel went on to adjust the machine as he saw fit. “Initially, the machine hoed out too many plants, which was mainly due to the high travel speed of 4 to 5 km/h. Now, we hoe at a speed of about 2 to 2.8 km/h, and that has been very successful.” Marcel notes that the settings require constant refinement. “That is usually due to the size of the strawberry plants. The cameras detect chlorophyll and therefore make no distinction
For each row there is a camera (with its own light source) scanning the plants.
36 ▶ FUTURE FARMING | 27 August 2019
Within a row two hydraulically operated hoe blades cut weeds when instructed to do so by the system.
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