PHOTO: JEREMY JONES
FIELD ROBOT ▶▶▶
Farmer Jamie Grant pleasantly surprised with SwarmFarm robot
BY RENÉ GROENEVELD J
amie and his wife Susie run a farm of 2000 hectares, a dryland cotton opera- tion with a cotton crop and French White Millet as a cover crop to store moisture.
He rotates these crops every second year. Weeds are always a problem. “There has been very low rainfall here for about eight years but we still grow weeds.” The Queensland farmer has been following the SwarmFarm robotic technology for years. “I have been wanting one for a long time”, he says. Mr Grant is well known in the region for his proactive way of farming and has been striving to continuously improve spray applications. In 2017 he was awarded the ‘Service to Industry Award’ by the Darling Downs Cotton Growers Inc for being an ‘innovative cotton grower’. The robot with the optical sprayer arrived at the start of September. Jamie explains that he does not have a special interest in technology.
Cotton grower Jamie Grant from the Australian district Jimbour is the first farmer that uses a commercial SwarmFarm robot with a WEED-IT system on his farm. It has a boom of 9 meters and a 1000 litre tank. Jamie is ‘pleasantly surprised’ with the robot. “We had far less drama than I expected.”
“I don’t particularly like technology, but if it can do something to help me or can make me some money, I’m interested.” In the past weeks Jamie has been running his new robot system daily. “We really don’t understand yet what the full potential of it is”, he emphasises. “The only way to find out is to get it working for you and see where it leads to. And we already learned a lot.”
Impressive figures Mr Grant says the first weeks of use have been without real problems . “We had far less drama than I thought we would have. We are just mak- ing the software more robust and more user friendly. It has left the theoretical stage and is
now in a commercial stage. With a system like this you always have certain inadequacies, but the people from SwarmFarm and Dalby have either fixed them or are working on them.” The results are encouraging. “I have just covered 3500 acres with it and i am about to turn it around and do it again with a double knock ap- plication.” The Queensland farmer has been working with selective spraying for 15 years and is expecting to save 95% of chemicals using the WEED-IT technology on his new robot. But even though these are impressive figures, he is already looking forward to a new technol- ogy. “We would like to use microwave technolo- gy”, he says. “That is exactly where I want to go to. I’m now just using the sprayer as a means to learn how to use the robot. We are focussing on spraying but plan to use the robot in many oth- er ways in the future.” Jamie knows microwave technology will only be part of the solution. “We will not kill all our weeds with microwaves”, he says. “It will primarily be used to mop up the weeds that are showing signs of tolerance. But at this stage this will be done in conjunction with chemicals.”
He is not against using chemicals. “We don’t want to part with them at this stage because I don’t think that is possible. But we have to try not to abuse them. We need different forms of fighting weeds that we can rotate with our chemicals. That will make the use of chemicals last longer. Otherwise we will be up the creek without a paddle.”
34 ▶ FUTURE FARMING | 1 november 2019
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