Precision Spraying

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Last week we told you how Parker Jones started Hermanos Automated Services with the purchase of a Garford InRow Weeder. For his next service, he is developing equipment of his own, this time for spraying.

Jones… “The majority of the spraying that's actually happening is from companies that are third party applicators. Those are the guys that are spraying and they're just kind of using, to me, outdated tech. They have pumps. They have some brake controllers. They just broadcast spray and we waste a lot of material, too. So I started thinking like, well, what if something could only spray the plant?”

Since Jones couldn’t find the technology to buy, he found someone already developing the technology to partner with, and eventually customize for leafy green and vegetable growers.

Jones… “I eventually found this guy, his name is Adam Hutton, and he had this machine, this technology he was using in cereal crops. You know, oats, hay, barley, alfalfa what have you. They would drive their sprayer through a field where it was everything was brown. And if it saw a green weed, it would spray it with an herbicide and kill it. We had to make a couple tweaks to the computer sensor height after two days of tweaking everything out in the field. We got it to work.”

Jones hopes to be spraying for farmer customers in the Salinas Valley very soon.