PHOTO: HANS PRINSEN PHOTO: HANS PRINSEN
CROP CARE ▶▶▶ Hoeing machines become high-tech C BY MARTIN SMITS
ompetitors are seeking to imitate a specialist such as the Dutch company Steketee, which has been working for many years to take hoeing tech-
nology to the next level, with camera-control as its most remarkable innovation. Steketee for instance, a Dutch specialist now owned by Lemken, began using cameras to guide hoeing along rows as much as 20 years ago, with its externally purchased Eco-Dan camera. On the basis of this experience, the company then developed its own camera sys- tem, the IC-Light. This currently constitutes the most advanced technology system on the market, partly because it also recognises col- ours (not only the green of plants). The level of technological development achieved by the UK company Garford, which has been supply- ing its Robocrop system for many years now, is also comparable with the Steketee IC-Light. Claas took over the company Eco-Dan in 2007, and it also supplies its system to third parties as a mounting set under the name Culti Cam. It is used by several manufacturers as the basis for a hoe that works along the row using cam- era technology. Future Farming recently watched a Steketee IC-Light machine in action in chicory.
Trend towards a broader hoe
The wider the hoe, the more difficult it is to properly hoe angled and sloping headlands. On the one hand, you want to hoe the entire surface, while on the other you do not want to hoe off any plants unnecessarily. It becomes an issue on uneven plots when using a 6m machine and certainly with a 9m one. This is where GPS offers a solution. By fitting each parallelogram with a cylinder and driving them separately, each segment can also be lifted individually. Technically speaking, this is the same as GPS-guided section control on a sprayer. The key condition for assembling this technol- ogy, the components for which have since be- come available from suppliers, is that the par- allelograms are suitable to lift each one
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With the prospect of even greater restrictions being placed on the use of crop protection products, it seems logical that mechanical weeding will attract even more interest. Hoeing machines will, of course, continue to be sold, including in conventional agriculture. They are however becoming more and more high-tech.
individually. An additional advantage of hy- draulic lifting of each parallelogram individu- ally is the possibility of placing pressure on the hoes where required if they struggle to dig into the soil. Section control is still only being sold sparsely, but companies such as Steketee, Garford and Monosem include it in their range.
Smart software
We should imagine the Steketee IC-Light cam- era as a piece of photographic equipment that takes digital photos in a flash. One of these digital photos consists of a fine grid of squares, and smart software can use this to work out accurately where corn, sugar beet or whatever crop is obviously growing in the row. A trick that has been used before to hoe accurately even before germination (or at a very early stage) using camera-control is to sow a row of
fast-growing cover crop in between the rows. This row of cover crop shows the system where it is safe to hoe, and where the crop seedlings will (soon) emerge. And at the upcoming Ag- ritechnica exhibition, we will begin to see the use of cameras to automatically adapt the row width to the conditions in the field. The technology behind camera-guided hoeing is similar to that which is used for facial recog- nition or for reading the letters and numbers of a vehicle licence plate. In digital photogra- phy, software has since been developed to rec- ognise characteristics such as ‘people who are smiling’. Sure enough, the software has proved itself capable of recognising that a photo in- cludes faces and whether or not they appear happy, and it is almost faultless at filtering out photos taken on the beach. This same technol- ogy can be used to recognise a crop of lettuce or sugar beet.
The hoeing machine is fixed to a parallelogram structure that features a cylinder for making sidewards adjustments using camera guidance. This structure shifts the hoeing machine a fur- ther 60cm behind the tractor.
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 1 november 2019
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