A Central Illinois agriculture technology company is focusing on automation and efficiency for the future of farming.
Precision Planting in Tremont hosted the annual Winter Conference last week. The event is more than 20 years old and reaches somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 farmers between the exhibit hall and presentations in Tremont and ten remote locations across the United States and Canada.
“We want these farmers and the dealers who are here as well, who service them as well, to go out, talk to their friends and bring more next year and you know, engage that network of farmers they have, because I guarantee they will learn something new,” said Rachel Potts, spokesperson for AGCO, Precision Planting’s parent company.
The focus at this year’s Winter Conference is the technology coming out of Precision Planting to speed up farming processes and save farmers time and cash. Low commodity values and high input costs plague the current farming landscape, meaning farmers are putting more into the field with lower returns.
Precision Planting product manager Luke Stuber says the new system Symphony Vision attempts to ease the pain.
Symphony Vision is a camera system attached to the sprayers farmers use to coat fields in herbicide. The cameras run an artificial intelligence model trained to find weeds. Stuber says that’s possible through feeding the model mountains of images of different types of weeds among fields of different kinds of crops.
It’s similar in practice to the way an AI chatbot is fed millions of pages of writing.
“The model has to learn what corn plant looks like, what a soybean plant looks like, what a cotton plant looks like, sugar beets, you know, essentially all the crops that we are growing,” said Stuber. “And so it’s actually a huge amount of data that’s put into that and trained on the model, but there’s big benefits from it.”
The model is trained to only start the sprayer and dispense herbicide when it spots a weed. Stuber says the result is an estimated 50 to 60% reduction in total chemical use, translating to between $25 and $50 saved per acre.
Another product on display at the conference doesn't utilize artificial intelligence, but it does automate a part of farming previously done by hand.
The Radicle Agronomics system works in two parts.
A mobile unit, the Geo Press, dispenses canisters, mixes soil, fills the canisters and geotags them for sampling out in the field.
A large black box full of tubes, funnels and chambers, the Radicle Lab, takes the canisters, tests the soil and provides results through a process previously doable only in a laboratory setting.
The lab can process a batch of about 400 tubes at a time, completing around 200 samples per day.
A dedicated software tracks the tubes, their geotags and their results.
“[Soil sampling] is pretty common after the crops are harvested in the fall, before you apply fertilizer, you will go out and do soil sampling, and so this is often contract services that do it,” said product manager Adam Vaccari. “They’ll go around and they’ll sample your farmers’ fields and then send those results, or that soil, to a laboratory.”
Farmers learn the pH balance of their fields, or the amount of phosphorous and other minerals, from soil sampling. It provides some guidelines on how much and what kind of fertilizer to use, with the proper analysis.
The Radicle Lab takes a 240 volt power connection, a garden hose for water and an air compressor to run.
“Then the same way you would start a dishwasher, you hit the start button and then it’ll process through and do everything automatically and you’ll get your soil test results,” said Vaccari.
Vaccari says the machine was created with the oversight of analytical chemists on staff at Precision Planting. The process being automated, mixing soils and chemicals, usually includes dozens of steps. He says it took about eight years to complete development.
“As far as we can tell, we’re the first fully automatic soil lab,” said Vaccari. “There’s other technologies out there that are on different parts of the process, but we were pretty unique in having a vertically integrated solution all the way from in the field, soil sampling, the dedicated software and then, of course, the automated lab.”
Vaccari says an easier process to understand soil quality, means a higher return on what farmers’ put into their fields.
Both products are very early in their commercial use. The Radicle Agronomics system will be leased out to businesses that provide soil testing services this year. Vaccari says, theoretically, a farmer could pick up a Geo Presser from their provider, collect the soil and bring it back to have it run through the automated lab.
Symphony Vision will be purchasable for farmers this year, though it has been tested in trial runs for the last four years. Stuber says Vision is a powerful proof of concept for AI use on the farm.
“I think very quickly you start looking at identifying plants themselves, like rows of plants,” he said. “So can you start thinking about row crop cultivating? Can you steer the implement? Can you use it on all your post passes? Can you use it to find weeds? Can you do it for pest identification, maybe even diseases? The future is big in this space.”
