"Intelligent spraying generates savings of up to 90% in cost of herbicides" - Interview with Bosch product manager

 

AgroPages exclusively interviewed Rodrigo Neiva de Lima, Bosch product manager, about "smart application" technologies. The smart application technologies were on display during Agrishow Fair, held from 29 April to 3 May in the city of Ribeirão Preto in the state of São Paulo.

 

 

Intelligent Spray Technology proposes to do the following: you now have a sprayer in the field, and when you are going to do herbicide application, the open spouts will spray the herbicide all through the land-area. With our system, we are putting in cameras to detect where weeds are and spray only where it is needed.

 

Within this camera we have integrated a set of lights to have more visibility in the planting lines in the field. This camera, with artificial intelligence, does the processing to see where there are weeds and where there are not, and in real time it controls the PWM valves to open and close the nozzles. Our system is connected, so this data is going to the cloud to help farmers better manage their farms.

 

 

We are talking about a savings of up to 90% in the cost of herbicides, in places where the crop has not yet emerged, and 20% to 30% after the crop has emerged. This is because we do not simply detect "green and non-green", but instead detect where the weed is present. It detects the line of planting and can see by the size of the weeds where they are located. This is a technology that we are developing in Germany, together with engineers here in Brazil. We have several people from Brazil working on the project today.

 

We want to make a development aligned with the demands of the Latin American market. This is a product that is in development and, now in 2020, I believe we are going to start naming some partners who are with us in this technology. They are working together with us to help with better management on the farm and, by 2021, we will have this technology present in agricultural machinery.

 

 

That depends on the speed of the spraying and depends on the region, which can vary from 15, 20 to 30 km/h. In Brazil we have very extensive fields. Today, when we talk about agriculture in Brazil, we are talking about a lot more hectares than we have in Europe. We understand that this Intelligent Spray Solution is ideal for the Latin American market.