Can Precision Sprayers Bring Back Chemistries?

Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Over the years, farmers have gradually lost tools in the form of chemistries that have helped them grow productive and profitable crops. Whether through regulation or resistance or other factors, the loss of these chemistries have really narrowed the options farmers have. But could precision spray technology change that? John Deere manager for technology standards and regulatory affairs Adam Barlow and others are working with regulators to ask this question.
Barlow… “Maybe there are chemistries that we have today that we are not able to be used. The future with precision application now brings those back onto the table so folks can use them. So there's big advantages to growers, the windows of application. The easiest example for me with See and Spray is dicamba. So in the Midwest we used dicamba a lot, and it was banned by a court system, which is not really how the process should work. The EPA was frustrated with that. So they made a ruling to say, okay, through the 2024 growth season, these growers can continue to use the dicamba they have in stock. But now in 2025, it's no longer usable. So the hope is if we can get these pesticide labels written differently, risk assessments get redone out of EPA, herbicides like dicamba, come back online and we can start using those again.”
Barlow said these are just some of the opportunities that this new precision spray technology can open up for farmers.