Think about a fallow or pre-emergence pass. You drive the whole field, tank full, spraying edge to edge. But most of what's under the boom is bare ground. You're paying for chemical, fuel, and time to treat dirt — because that's how a sprayer has always worked. It hits everything, evenly, whether there's a weed there or not.
So we asked the obvious question: what if the sprayer only sprayed the weeds?
That's FarmDefender™ Weed. Cameras mounted along the boom watch the ground as you move. On-board AI — running right there on the machine — picks out the weeds against the bare soil and fires the individual nozzles that need to fire. Everything over clean ground stays shut. The weeds get sprayed. The rest of the field stays dry.
Up to 90% less herbicide — honestly
On a fallow or pre-emergence pass, most of the field is empty. When you only spray the weeds, most of your tank is still full when you're done — up to 90% herbicide reduction in those conditions.
We'll be straight about that number: how much you save depends on your weed pressure. Thin fallow, you'll save a lot. A thick flush, less. But the math only ever moves one direction — you never spray more than blanket coverage, and on the ground most of us are covering, the savings are real. Fewer gallons bought, fewer acres of drift and overlap, less chemical on plants you never meant to hit.
How it actually works
The cameras feed live images into a small AI accelerator on the machine. It's trained to tell green from brown — a weed from the soil around it — and it makes that call in a fraction of a second, well inside the window it takes to fire a nozzle before the plant passes under the boom. No cloud. No cell signal. No round-trip to a server. The decision happens on the boom, at field speed.
Two things make that matter:
- Individual nozzle control, not section control. The one nozzle that sees a weed fires. Its neighbors over clean ground stay closed. That's a different level of precision than shutting off a whole section.
- It runs at real speed. Up to 10 mph, day or night, and it talks to your ISOBUS rate controller — including the Capstan PinPoint III — so it drops onto equipment you already run.
The records come free
Every pass logs itself. Each detection is GPS-mapped, every nozzle firing recorded, and the as-applied data flows straight into FarmIQ™. You end up with real numbers — what got sprayed, where, and how much product you left in the tank. That's the paperwork done for compliance, and it's the honest ROI conversation instead of a brochure estimate.
Where it earns its keep
See-and-spray shines where the ground is mostly empty: fallow and pre-emergence, chem-fallow, burndown ahead of the crop. It's live on customer booms right now — first season in the ground, real acres, not a pilot.
And it's built in Montana. We sell it direct, we install it ourselves, and when you call with a question, you get the people who built it.
If you're tired of paying to spray dirt, see how FarmDefender Weed works, take a look at the whole platform at farmdefender.us, or tell us your boom width and what you're fighting — we'll give you a straight answer.