Sugar beet
Where spot spraying pays first
Wide rows and slow early growth make beet the crop where weed mapping and spot treatment save the most.
Blocks of 10 to 80 hectares.
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What actually goes wrong
Beet sits in wide rows and grows slowly at first, so bare soil stays exposed for weeks and weeds have an open run at it. The herbicide programme is repeated and expensive, and it is applied across the whole field because the actual weed distribution has never been mapped. Beet is also a heavy crop moved by heavy machines, so the compaction from last year's lifting shows up in this year's stand.
How we set it up
Weed scans ahead of every pass in the programme, producing a prescription per pass rather than a single map for the season. Compaction analysis reads the crop over the traffic lines your terminals recorded. A base elevation map handles the standing water that beet punishes hardest.
The flight calendar across a season
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Establishment counts and the first weed map before the herbicide programme starts.
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A fresh weed map before each pass, exported as a prescription.
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Foliar disease surveillance and nitrogen top-up zoning.
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Compaction analysis over recorded traffic and the yield estimate.
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Traffic damage map for next season's remediation plan.
Capabilities in play, in order of how much they carry
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Targeted weed control
Spray the weeds, not the field
Cameras and on-board models find weeds plant by plant, then only the affected square metres get treated.
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Soil compaction detection
Read the tramlines the crop is drawing for you
Growth patterns, imagery and machine data together show where heavy traffic has closed the soil up.
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Automated field mapping
The base layer everything else sits on
One flight produces a high resolution 3D model of the field: elevation, drainage lines, headlands and problem ground.
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Precision fertilisation
Feed the rows that are short
The system works out which parts of the crop are under-supplied and builds a variable rate map for the spreader.
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Early disease detection
See the infection before the eye can
Multispectral imaging picks up stress, fungal infection and nutrient shortfall days before symptoms are visible from the cab.
What you end up with
Recorded on your fields, flight by flight. Not a projection.
- A prescription per herbicide pass rather than one blanket rate
- Treated area recorded pass by pass across the programme
- Compaction located against recorded machine traffic
- Standing water areas mapped from the elevation model
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